[R] R is GNU S, not C.... [was "how to get or store ....."]

[vincent@7d4.com]

Martin Maechler a écrit :

> please, please,  these trailing ";"  are  *so* ugly.
> This is GNU S, not C (or matlab) !
> 
> but I'll be happy already if you could
> drop these ugly empty statements at the end of your lines...

May I disagree ?
I find missing ";" at end of lines *so* ugly.
Ugly/not ugly depends on our observer's eyes.
 From my programmer point of view, I prefer to mark
clearly the end of the lines.
In many languages, it's safer to do it this way,
and I thank the R developers to permit it.
(in my opinion, it should even be mandatory).
(By the way, marking the end of lines with a unique symbol
makes also the job easier for the following treatment.)
And yes, I'm also a C programmer ;-)

 > {and I have another chain of argments why   "<-" is so more
 > expressive than "="

Why "<-" seems better than "=" is also quite mysterious for me.
There was a discussion about this point recently I think.
I believe in 99% of cases it's more for historical reason
(and perhaps also for some "snob" reasons).

I am not at all a 20 years experienced R programmer, but I have
written several hundreds of R lines those 6 last months,
and until today didn't get any problem using "=" instead of "<-".

But I'll read your chain of arguments with interest.