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I read this basic question on renaming objects and @Shane 's answer to it, pointing me to lazy evaluation. Now I wonder if assign is evaluated lazily, too. Just like here: assign("someNewName",someOldObject) rm(someOldObject) The reason why I wonder about this is the following use case: Assume I got 10K+ R objects each of which has two attributes called originalName and additionalName . Now I want to write a function that can efficiently let the user switch from one name to the other without losing these two attributes. Roughly like this... EDIT: based on @Hadley's input I have changed my code. switchObjectName <- function(x) { n1 <- attributes(x)$originalName n2 <- attributes(x)$additionalName objName <- deparse(substitute(x)) if(objName == n1) { delayedAssign(n2,x,assign.env=.GlobalEnv) } else { delayedAssign(n1,x,assign.env=.GlobalEnv) } rm(list=c(objName),envir=.GlobalEnv) } this works well, but I had quite some trouble to get the rm statement right. I tried rm(objName,envir=.GlobalEnv) but could not get it to work though objName is definitely a character cause it is the result of deparse(substitute(x) .

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