Once one starts writing more R code the need for consistency increases, as it facilitates managing larger projects and their maintenance. There are several style guides or suggestions for R; for example, Andrew Gelman’s, Hadley Wickham’s, Bioconductor’s and this one. I tend to write closer to Google’s R style guide, which contains some helpful suggestions. I use something similar but:
- I use
=for assignment rather than<-, because it is visually less noisy,<-requires an extra keystroke (yes, I am that lazy) and—from a merely esthetics point of view—in many monospaced fonts the lower than and hyphen symbols do not align properly, so<-does not look like an arrow. I know that hardcore R programmers prefer the other symbol but, tough, I prefer the equal sign. - I indent code using four spaces, just because I am used to do so in Python. I will make an exception and go down to two spaces if there are too many nested clauses.
- I like their identifier naming scheme, although I do not use it consistently. Mea culpa.
- I always use single quotes for text (two fewer keystrokes per text variable).
Of course you’ll find that the examples presented in this site depart from the style guide. I didn’t say that I was consistent, did I?
P.D. 2022-10-05 This is a very old post, which does not reflect my current practice. These days I use <- to assign, two spaces indentation, underscored_names, etc.