On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Mark Kimpel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I found the article the "Y of R" in the latest R news to be very > interesting. It is certainly challenging me to learn more about how R works > "under the hood" as the author states. What is less clear to me is whether > this approach is primarily for teaching purposes or has a real world > application. What is meant by "fragility of reliance on the function > name defined as a global variable" as a downside to the classical recursive > formulation of function "s"? How can that impact the average R programmer?
The entire sentence is: "We can avoid the fragility of reliance on the function name defined as a global variable, by invoking the function through Recall instead of using selfreference." so he is referring to the fact that if one self-references the function by name then renaming the function causes it to no longer work. That is there is fragile dependence on the function name. He points out that the R function, Recall, can be used to avoid that. ______________________________________________ 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.
