passing unevaluated expressions to C/C++

Question

I\'d like to pass a variable number of arguments from a function to C/C++, but would like to leave the arguments unevaluated and at the same time don\'t want to do any compu

Answer 1

One possibility is to do what match.call does (thanks to Ricardo Saporta for pointing me in that direction). This requires copy-pasting a few definitions from R source code that I won't do here, but the basic idea is to get the calling function from R_GlobalContext and then extract the function arguments from there. The rough sketch is as follows:

R_fn = function(...) .Call("cpp_fn")

// and in C++ code
Language cpp_fn() {
  SEXP sysp = ((RCNTXT*)R_GlobalContext)->sysparent;
  RCNTXT *cptr = (RCNTXT*)R_GlobalContext;

  while (cptr != NULL) {
    if (cptr->callflag & CTXT_FUNCTION && cptr->cloenv == sysp)
      break;
    cptr = cptr->nextcontext;
  }
  cptr = cptr->nextcontext; // because this is called from .Call and not from R_fn

  // and now cptr->promargs has the unevaluated arguments to do as one pleases
  // e.g.
  Language firstArg(R_PromiseExpr(CAR(cptr->promargs)));

  return firstArg;
}