I think Venables' and Ripley's convention makes good sense: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/mail/archive/r-downunder/2008-October/000300.html
So we not only are explicit about what we are assigning, but where we are assigning it. Cheers, Simon. On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 17:10 -0700, David M Smith wrote: > On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 8:29 AM, "Jens Oehlschlägel" <oehl_l...@gmx.de> wrote: > > Thus there is dangerous advice in the referenced blog which reads: > > " > > f(x <- 3) > > which means "assign 3 to x, and call f with the first argument set to the > > value 3 > > " > > The thrust of the blog post was the stylistic question of whether to > use <- or = for assignment, not a recommendation to use constructs > like this. (In fact, the next line reads "This is a contrived example > though, and never really occurs in real-world programming.") But I've > added your sound advice that such constructs are best avoided. I've > never seen the need to perform assignments in function calls before, > but I'll avoid them now knowing about potential for mischief from lazy > evaluation. Thanks. > > http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-arrow-for-assignment.html > > # David Smith > > -- > David M Smith <da...@revolution-computing.com> > Director of Community, REvolution Computing www.revolution-computing.com > Tel: +1 (206) 577-4778 x3203 (Seattle, USA) > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Simon Blomberg, BSc (Hons), PhD, MAppStat. Lecturer and Consultant Statistician School of Biological Sciences The University of Queensland St. Lucia Queensland 4072 Australia Room 320 Goddard Building (8) T: +61 7 3365 2506 http://www.uq.edu.au/~uqsblomb email: S.Blomberg1_at_uq.edu.au Policies: 1. I will NOT analyse your data for you. 2. Your deadline is your problem. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data. - John Tukey. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.