On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Steve Taylor <steve.tay...@aut.ac.nz> wrote:
> Responding to several messages in this thread...
>
>> > All the more reason to use = instead of <-
>> Definitely not!
>
> Martin and Rolf are right, it's not a reason for that; I wrote that quickly
> without thinking it through. An "=" user might be more likely to fall for
> the gotcha, if not spacing their code nicely. So the lesson learned from the
> gotcha is that it's good to space your code nicely, as others have siad, not
> which assignment symbol to use.
>
> However, I continue to use "=" for assignment on a daily basis without any
> problems, as I have done for many years. I remain unconvinced by any and all
> of these arguments against it in favour of "<-". People telling me that I
> "should" use the arrow need better agruments than what I've seen so far.
Fair enough, but you skipped right past the most important one: it
makes code easier to read. It's very nice to be able to visually scan
through the code and easily see where assignment happens.
>
> I find "<-" ugly and "->" useless/pointless,
I never used it either, until recently when I started using magrittr.
Maybe still pointless, but I find the form
> library(magrittr)
>
> "hello" %>%
+ paste("world,") %>%
+ paste("my name is") %>%
+ paste("Ista") -> hi
> hi
[1] "hello world, my name is Ista"
quite nice.
--Ista
whereas "=" is simpler and also nicely familiar from my experience in
other languages. It doesn't matter to me that "=" is not commutative
because I don't need it to be.
>
>> Further it can be nicely marked up by a real "left arrow"
>> by e.g. the listings LaTeX 'listings' package...
>
> Now that's just silly, turning R code into graphical characters that are not
> part of the R language.
>
>> foo(x = y) and foo(x <- y)
>
> I'm well aware of this distinction and it never causes me any problems. The
> latter is an example of bad (obfuscated) coding, IMHO; it should be done in
> two lines for clarity as follows:
>
> x = y
> foo(x)
>
>> Using = has it's problems too.
> Same goes for apostrophes.
>
> Shall we discuss putting "else" at the start of line next?
>
> cheers,
> Steve
>
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