R Environments, Scoping, and Evaluation With Some Applications

Abstract

This paper aims to expose one of R's important features that seems to be little-known by most users. The particular feature is language scoping, which R inherits from languages like Algol60 and Scheme. Although the feature is comparatively little known, it is quite important, and knowing about it can change the way that R is used. Rather than proceeding as a technical exposition, the content is presented as a series of examples. These are formatted (without continuation prompts) so that they are easy to copy and paste. The right way to read the paper is to copy the examples and experiment with them.