R is GNU S, not C.... [was "how to get or store ....."]
vincent at 7d4.com wrote:
Martin Maechler a ??crit :
please, please, these trailing ";" are *so* ugly. This is GNU S, not C (or matlab) ! but I'll be happy already if you could drop these ugly empty statements at the end of your lines...
May I disagree ? I find missing ";" at end of lines *so* ugly. Ugly/not ugly depends on our observer's eyes. From my programmer point of view, I prefer to mark clearly the end of the lines. In many languages, it's safer to do it this way, and I thank the R developers to permit it. (in my opinion, it should even be mandatory). (By the way, marking the end of lines with a unique symbol makes also the job easier for the following treatment.) And yes, I'm also a C programmer ;-)
> {and I have another chain of argments why "<-" is so more
> expressive than "="
Why "<-" seems better than "=" is also quite mysterious for me. There was a discussion about this point recently I think. I believe in 99% of cases it's more for historical reason (and perhaps also for some "snob" reasons). I am not at all a 20 years experienced R programmer, but I have written several hundreds of R lines those 6 last months, and until today didn't get any problem using "=" instead of "<-". But I'll read your chain of arguments with interest.
Well, I'll have to disagree a bit. While I don't care so much about trailing ";" (as long as it does not become mandatory), I don't like the use of "=" for assignment and that's definitely NOT for "snob" reasons, whatever those are. I just think code is *much* easier to read if assignment is distinguished from argument settings. Peter Ehlers