A little R prank
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By Gabriel Vasconcelos
R functions
The book Advanced R, by Hadley Wickham, shows a very interesting statement:
“To understand R, two slogans are Helpful:
- Everything that exists in an object.
- Everything that happens is a function call.”
– John Chambers
In other words, every action is caused by a function, and functions are things you can change. [, ( and + are all functions. That means you can call these actions as functions.
> a=1:10 > #Two equivalent codes > `[`(a,4) [1] 4 > a[4] [1] 4 > #Other two equivalent codes > `+`(3,7) [1] 10 > 3+7 [1] 10
Just a little prank
Imagine you want to do a little prank with your friend who left his R oppened in the office. You could change the + function like in the code below and see the magic happens.
> `+`=function(x,y)x-y > 1+1 [1] 0
More information on R functions
[1] Wickham, Hadley. Advanced R. CRC Press, 2014.
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