[R] R as a programming language

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

>
> At first I thought you were complaining about the syntax, which I find
> ugly.  There was a proposal last year to overload + to do concatenation
> of strings, so you'd type cat("x=" + x + "y=" + y + "\n"), but there was
> substantial resistance, on the grounds that + should be commutative.
>

My objection, at least, was that + should be *associative*.  I don't think 
anyone would expect a + b and b+a to be the same for strings, but I do 
think the fact that (a+b)+c and a+(b+c) would be different (if some of a, 
b,c were strings) has real potential for ugliness.

 	-thomas

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