R Programming By Example

Operators are functions

Now that you have a working understanding of how functions work. You should know that not all function calls look like the ones we have shown so far, where you use the name of the function followed by parentheses that contains the function's arguments. Actually, all statements in R, including setting variables and arithmetic operations, are functions in the background, even if we mostly call them with a different syntax.

Remember that previously in this chapter we mentioned that R objects could be referred to by almost any string, but you should avoid doing so. Well here we show how using cryptic names can be useful under certain contexts. The following example shows how the assignment, selection, and addition operators ...