From tlumley at u.washington.edu  Thu Aug  7 09:48:55 2003
From: tlumley at u.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Thu Aug  7 17:48:43 2003
Subject: [Rd] backtick notation
In-Reply-To: <20030807143937.7D92EE4B8@sitemail.everyone.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.44.0308070843200.142036-100000@homer06.u.washington.edu>

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

>
> Could someone explain the thinking behind the backtick notation in
> r-devel?
>
> I think I understand that it can be used to refer to variable names
> which would otherwise not conform to R syntax; however, assign and
> as.name already allow you to do this.  Is there more to it than that?

assign and as.name are fairly limited.  For example, if you have a list or
data frame whose name is syntactically invalid it is quite difficult to
access or modify its columns.


	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley@u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle


[Rd] backtick notation
Thomas Lumley