R's semantics is modeled after Scheme. Scheme is a functional language and R is functional too. I am writing about the functions in R and many R's strange usages are just syntax sugars of special function calls. What is rownames(x) [Read more...]

  R is different from C family languages. It has a C syntax, but a Lisp semantics. Programmers from C/C++/Java world would find many usages in R adhoc and need to memorize special cases. This is because they use R from a C's perspective. R is a very elegant ... [Read more...]

  A languages manual usually defines how a language behaves, but does not warn you in cases where you assume a feature should be supported but isn’t. As an example, I will talk about the subtle variable scoping in R language. {} code blocks A lot of programmers coming from C/... [Read more...]

Most of time, I don’t need to deal with different encodings at all. When possible, I use ASCII characters. And when there is a little processing in Chinese characters or other Unicode characters, I use .Net languages or JVM languages, in which every string is Unicode and of course ... [Read more...]