The use of period in function names and variable names
On 04.10.2011 18:18, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
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.
I switched to that when I realized that it is somewhat dangerous to conflict with S3 naming conventions and R CMD check yelled correctly because I used a generic.class notation where either "generic" or "class" was really the name of a generic or class but I had not realized before. Uwe
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-bounces at r-project.org On Behalf Of Smart Guy Sent: 04 October 2011 05:20 To: r-help at 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.
*******************************************************************
This email and any attachments are confidential. Any use...{{dropped:8}}
______________________________________________ R-help at 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.
______________________________________________ R-help at 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.