ivo...@gmail.com wrote: > Gentlemen---these are all very clever workarounds,
hacks around the lack of a feature > but please forgive me for voicing my own opinion: IMHO, returning > multiple values in a statistical language should really be part of the > language itself. returning multiple values is supported by many programming languages, in particular scripting languages. while in r you can use the %<-% hack or have functions return lists of values, it could indeed be useful to have such a feature in a statistical language like r. > there should be a standard syntax of some sort, if you mean that r should have such a syntax, you're likely to learn more about saying 'should' soon. > whatever it may be, that everyone should be able to use and which > easily transfers from one local computer to another. It should not > rely on clever hacks in the .Rprofile that are different from user to > user, and which leave a reader of end user R code baffled at first by > all the magic that is going on. Even the R tutorials for beginners > should show a multiple-value return example right at the point where > function calls and return values are first explained. as gabor says in another post, you probably should first show why having multiple value returns would be useful in r. however, i don't think there are good counterarguments anyway, and putting on you the burden of proving a relatively obvious (or not so?) thing is a weak escape. to call for a reference, sec. 9.2.3, p. 450+ in [1] provides some discussion and examples. vQ [1] Design Concepts in Programming Languages, Turbak and Gifford with Sheldon, MIT 2008 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel