[R] how about a "<p-" operator?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11-03-30 7:00 PM, Carl Witthoft wrote:
> I was cursing Matlab again today (what else is new) because the default
> action for every Matlab command is to spew the result to the console,
> and one must remember to put that darn ";"  at the end of every line.
>
> So I just wondered:  was there ever a discussion as to providing some
> modified version of the "<-" and "->" operators in R to do the reverse?
>    That is, since R does not print the values of a command to the
> console,  what if there were  an operator such that
>
>
>    newobject<p- somefunction()
>
> would do the same as
>
> print(newobject<- somefunction())
>
>
> Any thoughts?

Others have given alternatives.  Just some comments on this particular 
proposal:

We already have a problem that

x<-3

is slightly ambiguous:  does it mean

x <- 3   # yes

or

x < -3   # no

I think the compound operator <p- would just repeat this problem.  What does

x<p-3

mean?  If the amount of typing in print(x <- 3) is a problem, that's a 
user interface issue, so it should be addressed at the user interface 
level, not by changing the language.  A front-end could make it easy to 
transform x <- 3 into the longer expression (or an equivalent), or just 
make it easy to examine the .Last.value variable.

Duncan Murdoch