From bellis at hsph.harvard.edu  Wed Aug 25 02:47:37 2004
From: bellis at hsph.harvard.edu (Byron Ellis)
Date: Wed Aug 25 02:47:46 2004
Subject: [Rd] function bug (PR#7199)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0408242128360.1119-100000@kleigh.nl>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0408242128360.1119-100000@kleigh.nl>
Message-ID: <5C0831FC-F630-11D8-A576-000D93C24D64@hsph.harvard.edu>

Its there so people can be lazy and say s= instead of sb=. That sort of 
thing happens all the time in interactive environments. However, I'd 
hardly call it obfuscating---it doesn't reverse a known practice within 
the language domain, though its activity is apparently somewhat 
surprising. No worse than the effects of lexical scoping. Also, if 
people don't read the manual, how are they to learn the language? Its 
like saying you should make Scheme's macro syntax understandable at 
first glance. Unfortunately, the result is C's macro syntax (it you can 
call it that).


On Aug 24, 2004, at 3:34 PM, Peter Kleiweg wrote:

> Prof Brian Ripley schreef:
>
>>>> This is _not_ a bug.  Please read `R Language Manual', section 4.3.2
>
> Found it, without section numbers.
>
> I read it, and I can't think why anyone would come up with such
> a scheme. It goes against all practices in other programming
> languages. It is obfuscating. It's like designing a language
> where 'if' actually means 'unless', just so you can chide some
> more people for not reading the manual.
>
> -- 
> Peter Kleiweg
> http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
---
Byron Ellis (bellis@hsph.harvard.edu)
"Oook" -- The Librarian


[Rd] function bug (PR#7199)
Byron Ellis