A nice article by Thomas Lumley on a sort of macro facility for
R appeared in the R Newsletter a few issues ago:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2001-3.pdf
Reid Huntsinger
-----Original Message-----
From: Murray Jorgensen [mailto:maj at stats.waikato.ac.nz]
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 4:14 PM
To: R-help
Subject: [R] Macros versus functions
R is a function-oriented language and functions have the advantage that
they control unintended side effects of computations on the workspace.
Still, there are times when I am using R when I want to make a large
number of changes to the worksheet repeatedly and where the easiest way
seems to be to keep pasting in the same chunk of code, or to put it on
a file and use source("filename"). So effectively R does have macros
as
well as functions.
Question: is the use of macros in this way 'bad practice' to be
deprecated, and if so why? (If I decide that it is bad practice I will
probably go on being bad, but I will try not to pass on bad habits to my
students!)
Murray
--
Dr Murray Jorgensen http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html
Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz Fax 7 838 4155
Phone +64 7 838 4773 wk +64 7 849 6486 home Mobile 021 395 862
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