On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Vitalie S. <spinuvit.list at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello everyone!
Motivated by the recent post on SO
I wonder what is the current state of argument on making "+" to
concatenate character vectors. The "+" method is still sealed for
signature("character", "character") in the current version of R.
The 4 years old R-devel thread
https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-August/038991.html>
on the same topic, stopped without reaching any definite conclusion.
The only definite argument occurred in the thread against "+" operator
was the lack of commutativity (as if one have to prove algebraic
theorems in R).
Yet another useful suggestion of introducing cat0() and paste0(), for
the common use of cat and paste with sep="" was not absorbed by the
core R either.
The gsubfn package has always had a paste0 function and I would be
happy to remove it if the core adds it.
Also the gsubfn supports quasi perl style string interpolation that
can sometimes be used to avoid the use of paste in the first place.
Just preface the function in question by fn$ like this:
library(gsubfn)
fn$cat("pi = $pi\n")