Reasons not to answer very basic questions in a straightforward way; was: Re: [R] creating a sequence of object names

[Uwe Ligges]

John wrote:
> Thank you, Uwe. I've found a way to do the job by
> reading the FAQ 7.21 although it is not giving a
> precise explanation to a novice or casual user at
> first reading. For example, if you type the first two

But the corresponding help files do so, for sure, and the FAQ 7.21 
points you to ?assign and ?get.


> lines in the FAQ, you get an error as you do not have
> the variable, a, initially.
>
> I am sure that more and more people get interested in
> and serious about using R if advanced users are kind
> enough to answer simple and silly questions as well
> which are already explained in basic documentations.
> Or is this community for highly motivated and advanced
> R users only?

No, of course it is for novices as well!

BUT we do expect that novices do read basic documentation such as "An 
Introduction to R" and the R FAQ before asking question.
If there are too many silly questions from thousands of R users, nobody 
is able to manage the questions any more. And note that those people 
answering questions do it on a voluntary basis, and (at least partially) 
in their spare time!
Nobody would be subscribed to R-help any more, if there are 1000 mails a 
day, 900 of them containing silly questions! It is yet already hard 
enough to get through the huge amount of messages in a reasonable amount 
of time!


I have answered your question in a way,

  1) so that it is up to you to read some documentation. Now you have 
seen the FAQs and some help files. And you have learned much more than 
you would have learned if I had said "Use assign()"

  2) so that nobody feels too encouraged to ask questions before reading 
basic documentation - and my answer still saved you a lot of time!

Uwe Ligges




> Regards,
> 
> John
> 
> 
>  --- Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
> wrote: 
> 
>>John wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hello R-users,
>>>
>>>I wanted to generate objects named 'my.ftn1',
>>>'my.ftn2', ... , 'my.ftn10', and tried the
>>
>>following
>>
>>>code without success. How can I do this?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>for ( i in 1:10 ) {
>>>
>>>+ sub(" ", "", paste("my.ftn", i)) <- NULL
>>>+ }
>>>Error: Target of assignment expands to
>>
>>non-language
>>
>>>object
>>>
>>>
>>>Many thanks.
>>>
>>>John
>>>
>>>______________________________________________
>>>R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>>>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>>PLEASE do read the posting guide!
>>
>>http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>
>>
>>Please do as suggested above, read the posting
>>guide!
>>It suggests to read the FAQs. FAQ 7.21 is what you
>>are looking for: "How 
>>can I turn a string into a variable?".
>>
>>Uwe Ligges
>>
> 
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html