Are the seconds of a date object stored in the object?

[hadley]

@alistaire

v <- 1:3
tracemem(v)
#> [1] "<0x7ff3b93c8518>"
v[[3]] <- 4L
#> tracemem[0x7ff3b93c8518 -> 0x7ff3bcdb7ec8]:

You are probably confused here because you're running inside RStudio where the environment pane takes a reference. You should always run this sort of code in the console.