You still couldn't sway me into the <- camp. '=' is better for yet two more reasons,
1. it requires one keystroke, rather than two, 2. to type '<', one has to hold Shift then the ',' key, so it's a total of three strokes all together. In a typical script, you have hundreds of assignment statements. Those extra keystroke translate into quite a bit more wear on your fingers. H -----Original Message----- From: Erik Iverson [mailto:er...@ccbr.umn.edu] Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 1:23 PM To: Greg Snow Cc: Horace Tso; li li; r-help Subject: Re: [R] questions on some operators in R Greg Snow wrote: > Your example could also be used as an argument against allowing '=' as a > shortcut for <- after all if you are used to using <- (rather than =) then > you will see the problem with x<-2 right off. But if we eliminate <- and > only use =, then how do you do: > >> mean( x <- rnorm(100) ) > > Or > >> system.time( output <- longrunningfunction(args) ) > > Is > >> mean( { x=rnorm(100) } ) > > Really and improvement? Certainly not in my mind! For me, here is certainly an undefinable aesthetic appeal to the '<-' assignment operator. The visual requirement of seeing '<-' for me is so strong, that even when running example code from this list, I must replace all assignments done with '=' to '<-' before submitting them to R! I've also noticed that there seems to be an association between using '=' for assignments and writing code with 0 spaces per line in it. Of course, I insist on fixing that before running the code, too. :) ______________________________________________ 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.
