[R] Is there any difference between <- and =

[Wacek Kusnierczyk]

Alan Zaslavsky wrote:
> I would argue that this is a matter of preference and the arguments on
> "principle" for one side or another are not particularly compelling. 

indeed;  i have argued (i think...) for treating them as equals, the
vhoice being a matter of taste.


> When the "=" was introduced for assignment, an argument was made that
> name=value function arguments are also implicitly a kind of assignment. 

sure they are.  you assign (or not, depending on whether the arguments
are actually used) to function-call-local variables, that is, the
function's parameters.


> While Duncan has pointed out a typical example of how this could be
> ambiguous, <- also has its problems.  A syntactic confusion with "<-"
> arises in expressions like
>
>     x<-3
>
> which could be read either as an assignment or as a logical expression
> comparing x to -3.  

ha!  cool.

> Perhaps obviously ambiguous when written naked like this but when
> buried in a larger expression, it's easy to write an expression like
> that and discover that you have overwritten x.  

even worse if the code is processed in some way that might remove
spaces, thus turning < - into <-.

> Some might (and have, most emphatically) advise that we should
> routinely insert spaces in our typing in a way that disambiguates such
> expressions but I find an argument that relies on spaces, which are
> usually syntactically unmeaningful, not very compelling.
>
> Besides, I just find that clumsy two-character arrow ugly!  

:)

> This is an esthetic matter -- reminds me too much of an emoticon. :-(
> For over 10 years I used the alternative "_" underscore for S
> assignment (nice as a single character with no competing syntactic
> meaning) but that has gone away, as far as I can tell primarily due to
> discomfort (disdain?) of developers who find it unattractive because
> of the use of "_" as a connecting special category in OTHER contexts
> (C and shell programming).
>
> However, a mutually satisfactory solution is at hand!!  If growth in
> the number of R programmers continues exponentially at its current
> rate, by the year 2097 the number of R programmers will exceed the
> population of the earth.  At that point they will rise up and demand
> the restoration of the APL arrow key (remembered by some doddering
> guru who heard about it from her grandfather) to the standard
> keyboard, and our problem will be solved.  (But there will be a minor
> irritation because in the New Zealand keyboard that key code will have
> been assigned to the locally popular sheep icon.)

by that time r programs will be scanned directly from your head, i
suppose, and the intelligent scanner will as gladly take <- as it will
=, so the problem will rather vanish.

vQ