"David Scott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Can anyone provide further pointers to good style?
While not written for R specifically, the book "Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction" (2nd Edition) discusses a number of good concepts for writing good code in any language: http://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670 In particular, Part IV "Statements" gives a number of useful suggestions by type of statement, e.g., straight-line code, conditionals, loops, ... There are some practices used in R that I think should be improved. For example, many years ago I was taught in a software engineering class that the use of "magic numbers" was a bad practice, yet we find magic numbers used in R in many places. Instead of using "1" or "2" in an "apply", I'll write something like this trying for some sort of mnemonic apply(x, BY.ROW<-1, sum) or apply(z, BY.COL<-2, mean) I find BY.ROW or BY.COL to be more mnemonic than the magic numbers 1 and 2. The "sides" 1, 2, 3, and 4 in an axis statement should have some sort of mnemonic definition, too, perhaps: axis(BOTTOM<-1, ...) But I believe I was ostracized in this E-mail list the last time I suggested such mnemonics instead of magic numbers. efg Earl F. Glynn Bioinformatics Stowers Institute for Medical Research ______________________________________________ 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.
