On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 10:00 AM, Ben Bolker <bol...@ufl.edu> wrote: > John Kane <jrkrideau <at> yahoo.ca> writes: > >> >> I've only been using R for about 2.5 years but and I'm not all that good but > I vote for <- . >> >> I think the deciding factor is in RSiteSearch() and the various manuals. >> >> Almost everything I see uses <- . Why introduce = when it is not used > normally? It will just confuse the >> students who are trying to use any of the documentation. >> >> Not to mention they might slammed for bad syntax >> on the R-help mailing list. :) >> > > Those are all good reasons. > I have said something similar before > (see <http://www.mail-archive.com/r-help@r-project.org/msg16904.html>), > but I tend to use = because it seems to be more intuitive for > students, despite being logically confused at a deeper level, > and I want to spare them any additional cognitive load when they > are first getting introduced to R. > I'm not particularly convinced by the "<- is more general > and there are some contexts where = doesn't work", because I'm > not trying to be absolutely rigorous, nor teach all the possible > ins and outs of R syntax. I would be very surprised if any of > the examples given actually came up in the course of a first-semester > statistics/modeling R course.
I teach the idiom summary(fm1 <- lm(y ~ x, mydata)) in my introductory courses. > I just want to do what works best for > the students -- the problem is deciding on the balance between > short term benefit (<- is one more odd thing to get used to) > and long term benefit (they will see <- in other contexts, so > they might as well get used to it eventually). > > Ben Bolker > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > ______________________________________________ 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.