Bad choice of words I'm afraid. What I'm ultimately pushing for is a feature request. To allow string concatenation with '+' by default. Sure I can write my own string addition function (like the example I posted previously) but I use it so often that I end up putting it in every script I write.
It is ultimately a matter of readability and syntactic sugar I guess. As an example, I work in the bioinformatics domain and write R scripts for pipelines with calls to various programs that require a lot of parameters to be set/varied. Seeing "paste" everywhere detracts from reading the code (in my opinion). This may not be a very strong argument, but to give a bit more objective reason, I claim its more readable/intuitive because other big languages have also picked up this convention (C++, java, javascript, python, etc.). Josh Bradley Graduate Student University of Maryland On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbec...@ucdavis.edu> wrote: > > On Jun 16, 2015 3:44 PM, "Joshua Bradley" <jgbradl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Hi, first time poster here. During my time using R, I have always found > > string concatenation to be (what I feel is) unnecessarily complicated by > > requiring the use of the paste() or similar commands. > > I don't follow. In what sense is paste complicated to use? Not in the > sense of it's actual behavior, since what you propose below has identical > behavior. So is your objection simply the number of characters one must > type? > > I would argue that having a separate verb makes code much more readable, > particularly at a quick glance. I know a character will come out of paste > no matter what goes in. That is not without value from a code maintenance > perspective. IMHO. > > ~G > > > > > > > When searching for how to concatenate strings in R, several top search > > results show answers that say to write your own function or override the > > '+' operator. > > > > Sample code like the following from this > > < > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4730551/making-a-string-concatenation-operator-in-r > > > > page > > > > "+" = function(x,y) { > > if(is.character(x) & is.character(y)) { > > return(paste(x , y, sep="")) > > } else { > > .Primitive("+")(x,y) > > }} > > > > > > > > An old (2005) post > > <https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2005-February/066709.html> on > r-help > > mentioned possible performance reasons as to why this type of string > > concatenation is not supported out of the box but did not go into detail. > > Can someone explain why such a basic task as this must be handled by > > paste() instead of just using the '+' operator directly? Would > performance > > degrade much today if the '+' form of string concatenation were added > into > > R by default? > > > > > > > > Josh Bradley > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
