On 2011-04-09, at 2:08 PM, Ted Harding wrote:

> I think the right thing to so is to introduce the students to the
> basics of scoping, early in the process of learning R.

I know the basics of scoping perfectly well, but that doesn't stop me from 
occasionally misspelling a variable name that only causes an error much later.

OTOH, I think with Perl you can start declaring your variables "local" and keep 
the interpreter happy. But in R's context you then have to also start declaring 
what you expect to inherit from parent environments, and pretty soon the code 
is so encrusted with annotation barnacles that it loses the simplicity that  
makes R so nice in the interactive mode. 

What would be really nice is if we had a smart R editor/IDE that would "DWIM" 
and put a red underline under a misspelled name, but leave it alone when, as 
Duncan said, it's in the environment. 

Davor
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