
On Aug 25, 2005, at 5:57 AM, Richard M. Heiberger wrote:

> Michael Hoffman:
> I'm glad you like it, but personally I think it is strange and
> surprising to type in one character and get four unrelated characters
> instead. Wouldn't you think it were strange if typing in the other
> non-alphanumeric character used in identifiers, ".", gave you " <<- "
> instead? I sure would.
>
>
>
> A bit of history is needed here.  These are NOT unrelated characters.
>
> S was first written on teletype machines which did not have an  
> underscore character.
> The corresponding character was the single-character leftarrow.   
> Using the left
> arrow for assignment made good sense.  As equipment evolved and the  
> ASCII alphabet
> was invented, the leftarrow was removed from the keyboard and the  
> underscore was
> placed in its position.   Underscore as an assignment character  
> makes no sense.
> The composite leftarrow "<-" makes sense.  The spacing around the  
> assignment
> character " <- " improves legibility (and is therefore strongly  
> recommended).
> People whose fingers were trained on the underscore position of the  
> keyboard are
> pleased to get legibility without retraining their fingers.
>
> As a secondary benefit, the underscore is an ambiguous character  
> for people who use
> other computing languages.  In SAS, and in recent releases of R,  
> the underscore is
> an alphabetic character (that is, it can be used in variable names).

Also to add to the history lesson: in previos versions of R _ could  
be used as assignment. So f.eks.
   x_1:5
was valid code.

However, aside from the history lesson, I (like Martin) use  
assignment like 100 times more often than underscore, and assignment  
is not that easy to tyep as it involves four (two) characters.

So no, in this particular case, I find it very appropriate that  
underscore has been remapped.

Kasper
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


