R Programming By Example

Vectors

The fundamental data type in R is the vector, which is an ordered collection of values. The first thing you should know is that unlike other languages, single values for numbers, strings, and logicals, are special cases of vectors (vectors of length one), which means that there's no concept of scalars in R. A vector is a one-dimensional data structure and all of its elements are of the same data type.

The simplest way to create a vector is with the c() function, which stands for combine, and coerces all of its arguments into a single type. The coercion will happen from simpler types into more complex types. That is, if we create a vector which contains logicals, numerics, and characters, as the following example shows, our resulting ...