As promessas sobre as quais comentei em algum ponto no passado (de que o R-core iria incorporar suporte a objetos mais longos que 2^31-1) comecam a ser cumpridas.... Eu imagino que no R-2.16.x eh possivel que jah tenhamos alguma dessa funcionalidade (lembrem-se que o release schedule do R mudou e agora eh apenas 1x por ano)... Enfim, o texto abaixo informa as mudancas que ja' foram feitas no codigo-fonte. b \subsection{LONG VECTORS}{ \itemize{ \item There are the beginnings of support for vectors longer than \eqn{2^{31}-1}{2^31 - 1} elements on 64-bit platforms. This applies to raw, logical, integer, double, complex and character vectors, as well as lists. (Elements of character vectors remain limited to \eqn{2^{31}-1}{2^31 - 1} bytes.) \item What can be done with such vectors is currently very limited, and most operations will return the error \sQuote{long vectors not supported yet}. They can be serialized and unserialized, \code{identical()} and \code{object.size()} work and means can be computed. \item \code{dist()} can produce dissimilarity objects for more than 65536 rows (but for example \code{hclust()} cannot process such objects). \item \code{serialize()} to a raw vector is no longer limited in size on 64-bit platforms. \item The C-level function \code{R_alloc} can now allocate \eqn{2^{34}}{2^34} or more bytes on 64-bit platforms. } }