PRDV420: Introduction to R Programming

R operates on named data structures. The simplest such structure is the numeric vector, which is a single entity consisting of an ordered collection of numbers. To set up a vector named x, say, consisting of five numbers, namely 10.4, 5.6, 3.1, 6.4 and 21.7, use the R command

> x <- c(10.4, 5.6, 3.1, 6.4, 21.7)

This is an assignment statement using the function c() which in this context can take an arbitrary number of vector arguments and whose value is a vector got by concatenating its arguments end to end.

A number occurring by itself in an expression is taken as a vector of length one.

Notice that the assignment operator ('<-'), which consists of the two characters '<' ("less than") and '-' ("minus") occurring strictly side-by-side and it 'points' to the object receiving the value of the expression. In most contexts the '=' operator can be used as an alternative.

Assignment can also be made using the function assign(). An equivalent way of making the same assignment as above is with:

> assign("x", c(10.4, 5.6, 3.1, 6.4, 21.7))

The usual operator, <-, can be thought of as a syntactic short-cut to this.

Assignments can also be made in the other direction, using the obvious change in the assignment operator. So the same assignment could be made using

> c(10.4, 5.6, 3.1, 6.4, 21.7) -> x

If an expression is used as a complete command, the value is printed and lost. So now if we were to use the command

> 1/x

the reciprocals of the five values would be printed at the terminal (and the value of x, of course, unchanged).

The further assignment

> y <- c(x, 0, x)

would create a vector y with 11 entries consisting of two copies of x with a zero in the middle place.

Source: R Core Team, https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-intro.html#Simple-manipulations-numbers-and-vectors
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