[R] recommendations on use of -> operator

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 18/03/2010 3:10 PM, Emmanuel Charpentier wrote:
> An old (Lisp ? C ?) quote, whose author escapes me now, was :
> 
> "syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon"
> 
> .. but nowadays semicolons are rarely used in "real-life" R.
> 
> 					Emmanuel Charpentier
> 
> PS and, BTW, neither C nor Lisp have much use for semicolons... Was that
> Pascal (or one of its spawns) ? 

Not sure what you mean about C:  it's a statement terminator there. 
Pascal also uses it, but as a statement separator.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> Le jeudi 18 mars 2010 à 12:00 +0000, Prof Brian Ripley a écrit :
>> -> is usually only used when you suddenly remember you wanted to keep 
>> result of a computation, especially in the days before command-line 
>> editors were universal.
>>
>> fn(a,b) ... oh I'd better keep that ... -> z
>>
>> On Thu, 18 Mar 2010, Dan Kelley wrote:
>>
>>> I have never used   ->  but I noticed at
>>>
>>> 	http://github.com/jiho/r-utils/blob/master/beamer_colors.R
>>>
>>> that some people do.
>>> In fact, the above-named code has a sort of elegance about it 
>> (except 
>> for the use of "=" for assignment...).  To my eye,  ->   calls to mind a type of assignment that is meant to stand out.  For example, perhaps it would make sense to use  ->  to assign to things that are not expected to vary through the rest of the code block.
>>> Q1: is there a convention, informal or otherwise, on when to use the   ->   operator?
>>>
>>> Q2: if there is no convention, but if people think a convention might help, what would that convention be?
>>>
>>> Dan Kelley, PhD
>>> Professor and Graduate Coordinator
>>> Dept. Oceanography, Dalhousie University, Halifax NS B3H 4J1
>>> kelley.dan at gmail.com (1-minute path on US server) or Dan.Kelley at Dal.Ca (2-hour path on Cdn server)
>>> Phone 902 494 1694;  Fax  902 494 3877
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
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> 
> ______________________________________________
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