function bug (PR#7199)

Its there so people can be lazy and say s= instead of sb=. That sort of 
thing happens all the time in interactive environments. However, I'd 
hardly call it obfuscating---it doesn't reverse a known practice within 
the language domain, though its activity is apparently somewhat 
surprising. No worse than the effects of lexical scoping. Also, if 
people don't read the manual, how are they to learn the language? Its 
like saying you should make Scheme's macro syntax understandable at 
first glance. Unfortunately, the result is C's macro syntax (it you can 
call it that).

Prof Brian Ripley schreef:

This is _not_ a bug.  Please read `R Language Manual', section 4.3.2

Found it, without section numbers.

I read it, and I can't think why anyone would come up with such
a scheme. It goes against all practices in other programming
languages. It is obfuscating. It's like designing a language
where 'if' actually means 'unless', just so you can chide some
more people for not reading the manual.

-- 
Peter Kleiweg
http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/

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---
Byron Ellis (bellis@hsph.harvard.edu)
"Oook" -- The Librarian