On 8/26/06, John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1. I have to say that I find the idea of using "+" to paste character > strings together aesthetically ugly. > > IMO, one thing that makes functional object-based languages attractive > is that the generic function retains a consistent _function_, that is, > purpose and meaning, of which the methods are implementations. > > It escapes me totally why I should think of pasting strings as addition > in the mathematical or intuitive sense (as Brian points out re > commutativity, it fails a number of axiomatic properties). And if so, > what about "-", "*", "/" and so on? The mind boggles. > > Its excuse presumably is to save typing, but I would favor using some > %thing% operator at the cost of a couple of extra key strokes.
1. Anyone who uses javascript, python or the VAX/VMS DCL shell language probably finds + intuitive as all of those use + with strings to mean string concatentation. The use of + does have the advantage of some obvious extensions: - DCL used x - y to mean x with the first occurrence of y removed so that "banana" - "n" would be "baana" - python uses 3 * "b" to give "bbb". - one could define s += "x" to append x to s 2. The gsubfn package does include paste0 and cat0 (as well as the cati0 extension to gsubfn's cati) which are like paste and cat but default to sep = "" which reduces typing a bit. This is not as short as defining a new operator but does get rid of the sep= argument in a very common case and could be a reasonable compromise if it were moved to the core of R. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
