On 04/10/2011 7:04 AM, S Ellison wrote:
See para 10.3.2 'Identifiers' in the R language definition (always distributed 
with R in the html help system), or ?make.names, for a concise statement of 
what constitutes a valid variable name in R.

It's actually underscores that might give trouble with older versions, not '.'. 
But they'd have to be a lot older by R standards (pre 1.9.0).

I am not sure why there has been a recent shift away from periods and towards 
camelCase in some R packages;

Presumably the authors of those packages prefer camelCase. I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

Duncan Murdoch


personally I find a period or underscore much more useful for making a variable 
name readable. And a mix of camelCase and period.breaks makes it a lot harder 
to guess which case-sensitive string to use. The number of different 
combinations of case and period I end up trying for R.Version (occasionally 
used, never quite often enought to be automatic) defies belief ;-).


S Ellison

>  From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org On Behalf Of Smart Guy
>  Sent: 04 October 2011 05:20
>  To: r-help@r-project.org
>  Subject: [R] The use of period in function names and variable names
>
>  Hi,
>       I am looking for some guidance on whether I can use the
>  period(.) in function names and variable names.

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