Hello, I tried this pseudo-generator style experiment (see below). The "<<-" operator assigns to in the calling environment which would be the environment of "getN". Yet when the function incr is returned, isn't this environment lost? Also the print displays GlobalEnv, yet the globalenv does not have any mention of startgiven. This code was inspired from and old issue of RJournal , but I'm not sure how this works.
I'm not sure how this works and an explanation would be helpful. Thank you Saptarshi getN <- function(start){ startgiven <- start; incr <- function(n=NA){ print(parent.frame()) if(!is.na(n)) startgiven<<-n startgiven<<-startgiven+1 return(startgiven) } } a=getN(10) a() #11 a()#12 ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.