From: Martin Maechler
>
> >>>>> "P" == P Ehlers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >>>>> on Tue, 06 Dec 2005 08:35:07 -0700 writes:
>
> P> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> >> Martin Maechler a écrit :
> >>
> >>
> >>> please, please, these trailing ";" are *so* ugly.
> >>> This is GNU S, not C (or matlab) !
> >>>
> >>> but I'll be happy already if you could
> >>> drop these ugly empty statements at the end of your lines...
> >>
> >>
> >> May I disagree ?
> >> I find missing ";" at end of lines *so* ugly.
> >> Ugly/not ugly depends on our observer's eyes.
> >> From my programmer point of view, I prefer to mark
> >> clearly the end of the lines.
> >> In many languages, it's safer to do it this way,
> >> and I thank the R developers to permit it.
> >> (in my opinion, it should even be mandatory).
> >> (By the way, marking the end of lines with a unique symbol
> >> makes also the job easier for the following treatment.)
> >> And yes, I'm also a C programmer ;-)
> >>
> >> > {and I have another chain of argments why "<-" is so more
> >> > expressive than "="
> >>
> >> Why "<-" seems better than "=" is also quite mysterious for me.
> >> There was a discussion about this point recently I think.
> >> I believe in 99% of cases it's more for historical reason
> >> (and perhaps also for some "snob" reasons).
> >>
> >> I am not at all a 20 years experienced R programmer, but I have
> >> written several hundreds of R lines those 6 last months,
> >> and until today didn't get any problem using "="
> instead of "<-".
> >>
> >> But I'll read your chain of arguments with interest.
>
>
> P> Well, I'll have to disagree a bit. While I don't care so much
> P> about trailing ";" (as long as it does not become mandatory),
> P> I don't like the use of "=" for assignment and that's
> definitely
> P> NOT for "snob" reasons, whatever those are. I just
> think code is
> P> *much* easier to read if assignment is distinguished from
> P> argument settings.
>
> Thank you, Peter. Indeed, this is exactly the main of my arguments:
> Since "=" is used quite often in S for argument setting in
> function calls, *additionally* using "<-" for assignment is
> more expressive.
> Also, e.g., a2ps (a nice 'ASCII' to PostScript converter), comes
> {at least on Debian Linux} preconfigured for R, and uses nice
> typesetting for "<-"; similarly for ESS.
> OTOH, it's pretty hard to correctly markup and differentiate
> those "=" which are assignments from those which are function.
> argument settings.
>
> P> Peter Ehlers
>
> [But really, I'm more concerned and quite bit disappointed by
> the diehard ";" lovers]
>
> Martin Maechler
Matlab also allows both with and without ";", but I guess most people learn
quickly what the preferred way is: Without ";", Matlab prints the output of
commands, including assignments; e.g., if you assign a 1e5-row matrix to
something, and didn't terminate the line with ";", Matlab will print that
matrix to the console.
Personally, having the extraneous ";" doesn't bother me nearly as much as
not indenting the code properly or leave spaces around operators. I don't
use them, because I seldom have difficulty knowing when a statement is
suppose to end (given the code is properly indented). Those who use Python
would know quite well, too, I guess. For those who insist on having ";", I
guess they will never get the point of something like Python (or even
Fortran...).
Andy
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