On 11-03-30 7:00 PM, Carl Witthoft wrote:
I was cursing Matlab again today (what else is new) because the default
action for every Matlab command is to spew the result to the console,
and one must remember to put that darn ";" at the end of every line.
So I just wondered: was there ever a discussion as to providing some
modified version of the "<-" and "->" operators in R to do the reverse?
That is, since R does not print the values of a command to the
console, what if there were an operator such that
newobject<p- somefunction()
would do the same as
print(newobject<- somefunction())
Any thoughts?
Others have given alternatives. Just some comments on this particular
proposal:
We already have a problem that
x<-3
is slightly ambiguous: does it mean
x <- 3 # yes
or
x < -3 # no
I think the compound operator <p- would just repeat this problem. What does
x<p-3
mean? If the amount of typing in print(x <- 3) is a problem, that's a
user interface issue, so it should be addressed at the user interface
level, not by changing the language. A front-end could make it easy to
transform x <- 3 into the longer expression (or an equivalent), or just
make it easy to examine the .Last.value variable.
Duncan Murdoch
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