[R] R annoyances

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 5/20/05, Robin Hankin <r.hankin at noc.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> On May 20, 2005, at 11:00 am, Jan T. Kim wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 03:10:53PM -0400, John Fox wrote:
> >
> >> Since you can use variables named c, q, or t in any event, I don't
> >> see why
> >> the existence of functions with these names is much of an impediment.
> >
> > True, particularly since I'm not too likely to use these variables for
> > (local)
> > functions, and variables of other types don't prevent functions from
> > working.
> > (I thought this was a problem... I must be spoilt by recently having
> > to read
> > too much Matlab code, where parentheses are used to both enclose
> > subscripts and
> > parameter lists, thus rendering subscript expressions and function
> > calls
> > syntactically indistinguishable.)
> 
> 
> Heh, I'm a recovering Matlab  user too.  This is sooooooooooo true!
> 
> In Matlab:
> 
> f(10)    # function f() evaluated at 10
> f(10)    # 10th element of vector f.  confusing!!
> 

Note that there is an advantage to this, namely, that one can
reimplement it as a vector or as a function without changing the
calling code.