R annoyances
On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 08:14:24AM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:
From: Robin Hankin On May 20, 2005, at 11:00 am, Jan T. Kim wrote:
On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 03:10:53PM -0400, John Fox wrote:
Since you can use variables named c, q, or t in any event, I don't see why the existence of functions with these names is much of an
impediment.
True, particularly since I'm not too likely to use these
variables for
(local) functions, and variables of other types don't prevent
functions from
working. (I thought this was a problem... I must be spoilt by
recently having
to read too much Matlab code, where parentheses are used to both enclose subscripts and parameter lists, thus rendering subscript expressions and function calls syntactically indistinguishable.)
Heh, I'm a recovering Matlab user too. This is sooooooooooo true!
In Matlab:
f(10) # function f() evaluated at 10
f(10) # 10th element of vector f. confusing!!
R uses round brackets in two unrelated ways:
4*(1+2) --- using "(" and ")" to signify grouping
f(8) function f() evaluated at 8.
where there is no reason to use the same parenthesis symbol for both
tasks.
The same is done in Fortran/C/C++/Java/Python and God knows how many others...
And this is different from the subscripting / function call ambiguity, as these languages (to the extent I know them) are designed such that parentheses for precedence control are syntactically distinguishable from those used for function parameter lists: If the opening parenthesis is preceded by an identifier, that identifier is a function name and the parenthesis opens a parameter list. (Python is a somewhat messy case, though, because it uses parentheses for tuples too.) Best regards, Jan
+- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | *NEW* email: jtk at cmp.uea.ac.uk | | *NEW* WWW: http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/people/jtk | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----*