Horace Tso wrote:
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.
This is a valid point.
You can, however, configure your editor to automatically do this sort of
thing. For example, ESS for Emacs has 'ess-toggle-underscore', which
upon typing an underscore, will insert ' <- ' by default.
So compare:
x = y at 5 keystrokes using no keyboard shortcuts
vs.
x <- y at 4 keystrokes using the ESS default (counting '_' as 2 keystrokes)
I prefer binding M-= rather than underscore to invoke this behavior,
still two keystrokes, but more natural to me.
In a typical script, you have hundreds of assignment statements.
Those extra keystroke translate into quite a bit more wear on your
fingers.
In one R package I wrote here at work, I have:
'<-' assignments / total characters
956 / 96387
[1] 0.00991835
So, without keyboard shortcuts, I could have saved about 1000 characters
over the development time of this package. Compare to this email, which
contains over 1100 characters. :)
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