Learning R Programming

Understanding lexical scoping

In the previous section, we introduced the copy-on-modify mechanism. The examples demonstrated two cases in which this mechanism happens. When an object has multiple names or is passed as an argument to a function, modifying it will cause the object to be copied, and it is the copied version that is actually modified.

To modify an object outside a function, we introduced the use of <<-, which finds the variable outside the function first and modifies that object instead of copying one locally. This leads to an important idea that a function has inside and outside. Inside a function, we can somehow refer to variables and functions outside.

For example, the following function uses two outside variables:

start_num <- 1 ...