On 15-Nov-03 Ted Harding wrote: > However, personally I like the way questions are bounced around between > people. and answers are devoped "conversationally", as it were, and I > think a lot would be lost if this were not to happen. On the whole, > I welcome the load! > > R strikes me as somewhat special amongst languages in that there are > a lot of hidden subtleties, which sometimes are only pointed out by > the few people who are really familiar with them. At present this > happens on-list and usually very promptly, and this timely intervention > puts wrong ideas right before they get too deeply embedded; this > benefit would tend to vanish if a "summarise to the list" policy > were adopted.
And the following (in today's "?for" thread) is a perfect example of what I mean: =============================================================== > From: Peter Dalgaard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Angel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [R] ?for > Date: 17 Nov 2003 11:49:37 +0100 > > Further hint: ? is an operator, syntactically similar to + and -. > You can apply operators to the result of a for loop. Consider for > example > > x <- 1; - for (i in 1:10) x <- x * i > > (? has special semantics, but that is not noticed at parse time). =============================================================== This is just the sort of thing I love to see posted to the list, since it is an eye-opener. In fact, to really see what goes on I had to rub my eyes as follows: - for (i in 1:10) print(i) and I'm posting it hoping that it will enlighten some other people. Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 17-Nov-03 Time: 15:08:38 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
