Igor's Computer Blog

I wanted to show off embedding online spreadsheets from excel and sky drive, and remind myself how much I spend renting content, hosting, and renting software.  So, here's what an embedded excel sheet looks like To produce, save an excel file to your sky drive then click Share then Embedded: The excel web app control is great, you can sort, filter, or make local modifications (they are not saved to the original). Anyway - have fun with this.

In every programming language I've used, '=' is the assignment operator, but in R you can assign 1 to x in the 5 different ways  listed below.  I'm sharing this with you because it reminded me how many ways there are to skin a cat, and how each of those choices has tradeoffs. [A] x = 1 [B] x <-1 [C] 1 -> x [D] x <<- 1 [E] 1 ->> x [A] x = 1 '=' is supported in R, but rarely used.   Google Style Guide  says don't use it. And I've never seen R code that does. [B] x <-1 '<-' Is the most commonly used, so you'll almost always see x<-1.  Some R people claim x<-1 is a superior assignment operator since the '=' assignment  operator (x=1) can be confused with the equality operator (x==1).     It strikes me the '<-' assignment operator can be confusing as well.  When using negative integers a single space can really change the meaning aka: x<-1 vs x < -1. Trade offs are everywhere!