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Comment by ltjohnson | Hacker News Reader

I've added some examples to my above comment. My example is perhaps a little closer to 'median(x <- 10)' than you were asking for, but I think it illustrates the point that using '=' will not always have the desired result in places where '<-' would.

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My problem is that between work in work and work in startup I need to write in about 8 languages.

This applies in all languages:

vec1 = rnorm(100)

system.time(vec1)

mean(vec1)

And, I can get my colleagues to fix it when I screw up, even though they are not R-heads.

You gotta do what you gotta do, but your example probably doesn't do what you want in R.

  > system.time(vec1 <- rnorm(1000000))
     user  system elapsed 
    0.200   0.000   0.199

My computer takes .2 seconds to generate the million random normals and assign them to vec1.

  > vec1 = rnorm(1000000)
  > system.time(vec1)
     user  system elapsed 
        0       0       0

My computer only takes 0 seconds to evaluate the existing vec1 of length one million.

Ah - sorry - I was being a bit t'ick, and didn't twig the time thing. Should I require it, I will keep it in mind. Thank you.

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