Using get() with replacement functions

Question

Can anyone explain to me why the following example occurs?

#Create simple dataframe
assign( \"df\" , data.frame( P = runif(5) , Q = runif(5) , R = runif(5) )         


        

Answer 1

Using assign in the way you demonstrate in the question is at least uncommon in R. Normally you would just put all objects in a list.

So, instead of

for (i in 1:10) {
assign( paste( "Object" , i , sep = "." ) , rnorm(1000 , i) )}

you would do

objects <- list()
for (i in 1:10) {
objects[[i]] <- rnorm(1000 , i) }

In fact, this construct is so common that there is a (optimized) function (lapply), which does something similar:

objects <- lapply(1:10, function(x) rnorm(1000,x))

You can then access, e.g., the first object as objects[[1]] and there are several functions for working with lists.