How to Automate NULL Object Creation - r

Question

This question actual just became alot more interesting.
My question is simple. How do I automate this?
g.names<-NULL
g.names1<-NULL
g.names2<-NULL
g.names3<-NULL
g.names4<-NULL
g.names5<-NULL
g.names6<-NULL
g.names7<-NULL
g.names8<-NULL
g.names9<-NULL
g.names10<-NULL
g.names11<-NULL
g.names12<-NULL
gt.names<-list(
g.names1=g.names1,
g.names2=g.names2,
g.names3=g.names3,
g.names4=g.names4,
g.names5=g.names5,
g.names6=g.names6,
g.names7=g.names7,
g.names8=g.names8,
g.names9=g.names9,
g.names10=g.names10,
g.names11=g.names11,
g.names12=g.names12,
g.names=g.names)
gt.names
Initially the problem seemed to be logically solved with the proposed solution below,
g.names <- list()
for (i in 1:13) {
g.names[[i]] <- NULL
}
g.names
Interestingly, this did not work! Assigning NULL to an object within a list is actually equivalent to delete. So, now the question still stands.

Answer 1

The "polluted" way of doing this is through assign and for loop:
x <- c("", 1:12)
y <- paste("g.names", x, sep="")
for (v in y) {
assign(v, NULL)
}
As commenter noted, the method above is very polluted... Here's an example of using list:
g.names <- list()
for (i in 1:13) {
g.names[[i]] <- NULL
}
g.names
Here you would create a list object that hold the values of 13 variables, corresponding to g.names, g.names1, ... , g.names12 in your original example. You can use g.names[[6]] to refer to your g.names5. It's less polluted and more "elegant" I guess.
And if the 13 g.names are going to be just series of characters or numbers, a vector will do:
g.names <- rep(NULL, 13)
g.names
and in this case g.names[6] will be equivalent to g.names5 in your question.