R annoyances

On Friday, May 20, 2005 11:29 AM, Jari Oksanen wrote:

The most beautiful thing in old R (I started with 0.63) was 
that it was 
in the elegant unix tradition: all lower case and point (full stop, 
period, whatever) in places where you needed it. It is 
unfortunate that 
other languages are creeping in and old neat constructions 
are replaces 
with C++ style uGliNess. There was a grace period when switching from 
beautiful (fair) print.coefmat to ugLy printCoefmat, but some changes 
were more abrupt (package.description). I have a feeling that the 
recent trashing of names.dist (with a lot of code breakage 
even in base 
R) was caused by the same kind of political correctness.

Please Mr R, keep it like it used to be...

BecauseIt'sFridayI'llJoinIntoThisTiredOldDebate.TheUseOfMixedCase
UglinessToDistinguishBetween"Words"InObjectNamesIsIndeedAn
Abomination.

It_is_much_easier,_and_demonstrably_so_I_would_say,_to_use
some_kind_of_real_separator_between_"words."

S.and.R.have.historically.encouraged.a.different.separator
than.most.other.languages,.but.the.principle.is.the.same.

And the double benefit is that it leaves case available for
other good uses, such as indicating an object's scope:

    local.var
    Class.Data
    GLOBAL.SETTING

--Todd