Alan Zaslavsky wrote: > I would argue that this is a matter of preference and the arguments on > "principle" for one side or another are not particularly compelling.
indeed; i have argued (i think...) for treating them as equals, the vhoice being a matter of taste. > When the "=" was introduced for assignment, an argument was made that > name=value function arguments are also implicitly a kind of assignment. sure they are. you assign (or not, depending on whether the arguments are actually used) to function-call-local variables, that is, the function's parameters. > While Duncan has pointed out a typical example of how this could be > ambiguous, <- also has its problems. A syntactic confusion with "<-" > arises in expressions like > > x<-3 > > which could be read either as an assignment or as a logical expression > comparing x to -3. ha! cool. > Perhaps obviously ambiguous when written naked like this but when > buried in a larger expression, it's easy to write an expression like > that and discover that you have overwritten x. even worse if the code is processed in some way that might remove spaces, thus turning < - into <-. > Some might (and have, most emphatically) advise that we should > routinely insert spaces in our typing in a way that disambiguates such > expressions but I find an argument that relies on spaces, which are > usually syntactically unmeaningful, not very compelling. > > Besides, I just find that clumsy two-character arrow ugly! :) > This is an esthetic matter -- reminds me too much of an emoticon. :-( > For over 10 years I used the alternative "_" underscore for S > assignment (nice as a single character with no competing syntactic > meaning) but that has gone away, as far as I can tell primarily due to > discomfort (disdain?) of developers who find it unattractive because > of the use of "_" as a connecting special category in OTHER contexts > (C and shell programming). > > However, a mutually satisfactory solution is at hand!! If growth in > the number of R programmers continues exponentially at its current > rate, by the year 2097 the number of R programmers will exceed the > population of the earth. At that point they will rise up and demand > the restoration of the APL arrow key (remembered by some doddering > guru who heard about it from her grandfather) to the standard > keyboard, and our problem will be solved. (But there will be a minor > irritation because in the New Zealand keyboard that key code will have > been assigned to the locally popular sheep icon.) by that time r programs will be scanned directly from your head, i suppose, and the intelligent scanner will as gladly take <- as it will =, so the problem will rather vanish. vQ ______________________________________________ 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.
