[R] the underscore ("_") in variable name

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On 2 Oct 2000, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Murray Jorgensen <maj at waikato.ac.nz> writes:
> 
> > This seems as good a place as any to gripe about the R/S assignment symbol
> > "<-" !  What absolute fiend said: "now let's see, this is the symbol that
> > will be most used in this language, so let's represent it by a
> > two-character string, and further, let's have the two characters in
> > different cases so that it will require a change of case mid-stream!".
> 
> Nicklaus Wirth? (Pascal has ":=")
> 
> Actually, on a Danish keyboard "<-" is two unshifted symbols whereas
> the underscore is a shifted dash, so it is pretty much a toss-up for
> me. You don't want to know where they put the rest of the special
> symbols, though... 

On the Italian and Spanish keyboards I was using last month, ~ is not even
on the keyboard. (alt+0126 became familiar.)

Svr4 allows = for assignment in most circumstances, but once you start
using it you discover the exceptions really bite.  As far as I recall Bill
changed <- to = at a late stage in the notes of the joint course we gave,
and we then found 22 examples where it was wrong.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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