R help - Sep 2015 - Boolean expression

Dear fellow R users,

I would like to discuss something. First of all, I would like to make clear
that I think that the current R software is great.

I have noticed that, for example, in the boolean expression
"if(a<-1)", it
is not clear if what is asked is "if 'a' is 1" or "if
'a' is lesser than
-1". Should we just enclose "-1" within parentheses or should we
have a
more unequivocal syntax, here, like "a<$", "a<%"?

Best regards,

?Jue

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Hi Jue,
The character sequence "<-" is preferentially interpreted as
"assign the
value on the right to the name on the left". You can use parentheses to
force the unary minus to be interpreted:

if(a<(-1))

or you can just break the sequence with a space:

if(a< -1)

One less character, but perhaps easier to misread.

Jim


On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 9:10 PM, Jue Lin-Ye <jl.iccp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear fellow R users,
>
> I would like to discuss something. First of all, I would like to make clear
> that I think that the current R software is great.
>
> I have noticed that, for example, in the boolean expression
"if(a<-1)", it
> is not clear if what is asked is "if 'a' is 1" or
"if 'a' is lesser than
> -1". Should we just enclose "-1" within parentheses or
should we have a
> more unequivocal syntax, here, like "a<$", "a<%"?
>
> Best regards,
>
> ?Jue
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
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?Dear Dr. Lemon,

I am amazed, I did not know that a space could solve this issue. So you
mean that, besides being sensible to letter capitalization, R is also
sensible to spaces?

Many thanks!

Jue?

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