Responding to several messages in this thread...
> > All the more reason to use = instead of <-
> Definitely not!
Martin and Rolf are right, it's not a reason for that; I wrote that quickly
without thinking it through. An "=" user might be more likely to fall for the
gotcha, if not spacing their code nicely. So the lesson learned from the
gotcha is that it's good to space your code nicely, as others have siad, not
which assignment symbol to use.
However, I continue to use "=" for assignment on a daily basis without any
problems, as I have done for many years. I remain unconvinced by any and all
of these arguments against it in favour of "<-". People telling me that I
"should" use the arrow need better agruments than what I've seen so far.
I find "<-" ugly and "->" useless/pointless, whereas "=" is simpler and also
nicely familiar from my experience in other languages. It doesn't matter to me
that "=" is not commutative because I don't need it to be.
> Further it can be nicely marked up by a real "left arrow"
> by e.g. the listings LaTeX 'listings' package...
Now that's just silly, turning R code into graphical characters that are not
part of the R language.
> foo(x = y) and foo(x <- y)
I'm well aware of this distinction and it never causes me any problems. The
latter is an example of bad (obfuscated) coding, IMHO; it should be done in two
lines for clarity as follows:
x = y
foo(x)
> Using = has it's problems too.
Same goes for apostrophes.
Shall we discuss putting "else" at the start of line next?
cheers,
Steve
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