[Rd] backtick notation

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

>
> Could someone explain the thinking behind the backtick notation in
> r-devel?
>
> I think I understand that it can be used to refer to variable names
> which would otherwise not conform to R syntax; however, assign and
> as.name already allow you to do this.  Is there more to it than that?

assign and as.name are fairly limited.  For example, if you have a list or
data frame whose name is syntactically invalid it is quite difficult to
access or modify its columns.


	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle