[R] Combined variable names

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

I wrote about the perennial "assign to V1 ... Vn" problem:
	> >What I want to know is *WHY* people are doing this?

I failed to make myself clear.

What I meant was "what happens NEXT?  Once someone has got past the
stage of generating V1 ... V100 (or whatever the magic number is),
what do they intend to DO with them?

I think this is the important question, and I think that this is what
the FAQ needs to give help with, and once I understand what people are
trying to accomplish *overall* I will be happy to offer some text for
the FAQ.

I've used stats packages myself that let you abbreviate a range of
variables.  The thing is that this was supported by *analysis* methods
(and output methods), not just *input* methods.  Now it seems to me
that pretty much everything I would want to do with a bunch of
separate variables like this in such a package would mean in R that I
desperately wanted these things to be columns in a data frame.

Perhaps the next time someone asks this question we can ask them what
they intend to do with the variables once they have them.  On past
history, we shan't have to wait very long.