[R] recommendations on use of -> operator

[Emmanuel Charpentier]

Le jeudi 18 mars 2010 à 15:49 -0400, Duncan Murdoch a écrit :
> 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.

Quite right ! And I know I'm falling in that trap every time I don't
code in C for more than a few weeks (it has been three months, now...).
That's probably because this "end-of-statement" role desn't strike my
psyche as important enough... (And maybe because Lisp and, to a lesser
extend, Pascal were my computer "mother tongues", APL a serious crush
and Fortran something of an "(almost)-read-only" acquaintance).

Nice thinko...

					Emmanuel Charpentier
					Still recovering...
> 
> 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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> >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> >>> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> >>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> >>>
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.