[R] R annoyances

[Jan T. Kim]

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 08:14:24AM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> > From: Robin Hankin
> > 
> > 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!!
> > 
> > R uses round brackets in two unrelated ways:
> > 
> >   4*(1+2)  --- using "(" and ")" to signify grouping
> > f(8)  function f() evaluated at 8.
> > 
> > where there is no reason to use the same parenthesis symbol for both 
> > tasks.
> 
> The same is done in Fortran/C/C++/Java/Python and God knows how many
> others...

And this is different from the subscripting / function call ambiguity,
as these languages (to the extent I know them) are designed such that
parentheses for precedence control are syntactically distinguishable
from those used for function parameter lists: If the opening parenthesis
is preceded by an identifier, that identifier is a function name and
the parenthesis opens a parameter list.

(Python is a somewhat messy case, though, because it uses parentheses
for tuples too.)

Best regards, Jan
-- 
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