Coding practice in R : what are the advantages and disadvantages of different styles?

Question

The recent questions regarding the use of require versus :: raised the question about which programming styles are used when programming in R, and what their advantages/disa

Answer 1

Naming conventions are extremely important for the readability of the code. Inspired by R's S4 internal style here is what I use:

• camelCase for global functions and objects (like doSomething, getXyyy, upperLimit)
• functions start with a verb
• not exported and helper functions always start with "."
• local variables and functions are all in small letters and in "_" syntax (do_something, get_xyyy), It makes it easy to distinguish local vs global and therefore leads to a cleaner code.