disttools - Distance Object Manipulation Tools
Provides convenient methods for accessing the data in
'dist' objects with minimal memory and computational overhead.
'disttools' can be used to extract the distance between any
pair or combination of points encoded by a 'dist' object using
only the indices of those points. This is an improvement over
existing functionality, which requires either coercing a 'dist'
object into a matrix or calculating the one dimensional index
corresponding to a pair of observations. Coercion to a matrix
is undesirable because doing so doubles the amount of memory
required for storage. In contrast, there is no inherent
downside to the latter solution. However, in part due to
several edge cases, correctly and efficiently implementing such
a solution can be challenging. 'disttools' abstracts away these
challenges and provides a simple interface to access the data
in a 'dist' object using the latter approach.
