On Jun 18, 2010, at 5:15 PM, Horace Tso wrote:
You still couldn't sway me into the <- camp. '=' is better for yet
two more reasons,
1. it requires one keystroke, rather than two,
2. to type '<', one has to hold Shift then the ',' key, so it's a
total of three strokes all together.
In a typical script, you have hundreds of assignment statements.
Those extra keystroke translate into quite a bit more wear on your
fingers.
If you are so productive that the rate-limiting step in your
statistical programming is the number of times you need to type "<-",
then your sample(c("MacArthur Award", "Nobel Prize", "Chambers
Award"), 1, prob=c(0.1,0.1, 0.8) ) , will surely be granted in
rnorm(1, 8) years.
--
David.
H
-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Iverson [mailto:er...@ccbr.umn.edu]
Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 1:23 PM
To: Greg Snow
Cc: Horace Tso; li li; r-help
Subject: Re: [R] questions on some operators in R
Greg Snow wrote:
Your example could also be used as an argument against allowing '='
as a shortcut for <- after all if you are used to using <- (rather
than =) then you will see the problem with x<-2 right off. But if
we eliminate <- and only use =, then how do you do:
mean( x <- rnorm(100) )
Or
system.time( output <- longrunningfunction(args) )
Is
mean( { x=rnorm(100) } )
Really and improvement?
Certainly not in my mind!
For me, here is certainly an undefinable aesthetic appeal to the '<-'
assignment operator. The visual requirement of seeing '<-' for me
is so
strong, that even when running example code from this list, I must
replace all assignments done with '=' to '<-' before submitting them
to
R! I've also noticed that there seems to be an association between
using
'=' for assignments and writing code with 0 spaces per line in it. Of
course, I insist on fixing that before running the code, too. :)
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