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A comment on R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind. Parent comment

Re:R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind by charles-salvia on Sunday March 05, 2017 @09:39PM (#13800328)
The first time I tried to read R code I was immediately disgusted with how '.' is a valid variable name character. Not only valid, but inexplicably also in common use.
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Re:R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind by gone35 on Sunday March 05, 2017 @10:22PM (#13800455)
That's in part because, unaccountably, '_' denotes assignment in S.
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Re:R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind by yuubi on Monday March 06, 2017 @09:27PM (#13807835)
> unaccountably

Maybe because in ASCII-63 the _ codepoint meant left-arrow (which was preserved in at least smalltalk systems much past the 60s)?

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Re:R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind by shanusmagnus on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @05:08PM (#13815511)
My theory is that they might have been trying to protest against the non-mathematical theft of = (equality) to mean assignment, as = is used in most other languages. (Not that that's an excuse for violating the shit out of the Principle of Least Surprise in a trillion different ways.)
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