[R] Teaching R: To quote, or not to quote?

[S Ellison]

>>> Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> 03/07/11 3:17 PM >>>
>On 07/03/2011 9:52 AM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) wrote:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> When I teach an intro workshop on R, I've been minimizing 
>>"quote confusion" by always using quotes around package names
>> in function calls. 
>> ... I'm wondering if there's a downside to this. 
>
>The only reasons I can think to avoid that recommendation is that 
>people  might find typing unnecessary quotes to be irritating and 
>they  might be confused when they see unquoted usage 
>elsewhere.  Those aren't particularly strong reasons...

Agreed, especially for library and the like where . But from a user
perspective most of the advantage of ?mean and ??mean over help("mean")
is the reduction in typing - especially the utility of things like only
typing the ? in 
?rnorm(q=23) 
after "Error in rnorm(q = 23) : unused argument(s) (q = 23)". That is so
useful that I'd say it's worth reinforcing by using ? without quotes
where possible.



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