[R] The use of F for False and T for True

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Mon Nov 17 20:20:19 CET 2008


How about

!!0 # FALSE
!!1 # TRUE

Although its one more char, its very easy to press ! twice and when you
look at it its more obvious since 0 is associated with FALSE and
1 with TRUE.

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 12:42 PM, Henrik Bengtsson <hb at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> To save my fingers and still being on the safe side, I always do:
>
>> !0
> [1] TRUE
>> !1
> [1] FALSE
>
> ;)  ...still hackable though.
>
> /Henrik
>
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 5:25 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> On 17/11/2008 8:03 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Simon Blomberg <s.blomberg1 at uq.edu.au>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> It is better programming practice to use FALSE for false and TRUE for
>>>> true, and not F and T. This is because it is quite legal to do this:
>>>>
>>>> T <- FALSE
>>>> F <- TRUE
>>>
>>> It may be better programming practice, but is it better interactive
>>> data analysis practice?  R isn't just a programming language, and
>>> there are lots of good reasons to provide shortcuts that reduce
>>> typing.  It's very easy to forget that most people can't touch type at
>>> a decent speed, and every key press less helps them get their ideas
>>> from their head to the computer faster.
>>
>> That would be an argument for T and F being the reserved words (as I think
>> they are in S-PLUS).  But since it's so easy to use T or F as a variable,
>> the problems caused by using them as TRUE or FALSE are not negligible --
>> look at the original question in this thread, which was likely caused by
>> using F as a variable.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>



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