John Kane <jrkrideau <at> yahoo.ca> writes: > > I've only been using R for about 2.5 years but and I'm not all that good but I vote for <- . > > I think the deciding factor is in RSiteSearch() and the various manuals. > > Almost everything I see uses <- . Why introduce = when it is not used normally? It will just confuse the > students who are trying to use any of the documentation. > > Not to mention they might slammed for bad syntax > on the R-help mailing list. :) >
Those are all good reasons. I have said something similar before (see <http://www.mail-archive.com/r-help@r-project.org/msg16904.html>), but I tend to use = because it seems to be more intuitive for students, despite being logically confused at a deeper level, and I want to spare them any additional cognitive load when they are first getting introduced to R. I'm not particularly convinced by the "<- is more general and there are some contexts where = doesn't work", because I'm not trying to be absolutely rigorous, nor teach all the possible ins and outs of R syntax. I would be very surprised if any of the examples given actually came up in the course of a first-semester statistics/modeling R course. I just want to do what works best for the students -- the problem is deciding on the balance between short term benefit (<- is one more odd thing to get used to) and long term benefit (they will see <- in other contexts, so they might as well get used to it eventually). Ben Bolker ______________________________________________ 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.
