A bad idea in R: using variables named like existing functions

R has an amazing robustness to programming weirdness. To give you a first idea: you can call a function with missing arguments, with named or unnamed (or truncated-named!) arguments, with badly-ordered arguments (as long as you name them), or with truncated parameter values as long as they are unambiguous. For instance, all these work and give the very same result:

curve(expr=dexp(x, rate = 1, log = TRUE),from=0,to=5);
curve(expr=dexp(x, rat = 1, lo = T),fro=0,to=5);
curve(dexp(x, rate = 1, log = T),0,5);
curve(from=0,to=5,expr=dexp(x,log = T, rate = 1));

And it is even possible to create a variable which has the same name as an existing standard function (you can’t do that with user-defined functions, though). For instance, check out this sequence:

> max=5;
> max(8,7);
[1] 8
> max;
[1] 5

We define a variable called “max”, set it to 5, then use the max() function normally, then call our “max” variable.

Falling to this kind of lazy standards, though, isn’t a good idea, because problems can arise. For instance if you name a variable like a standard function, you won’t be able to use apply() on it any more:

> A=matrix(c(1,5,2,4),2,2);
> max=5;
> apply(A,2,max);
Error in get(as.character(FUN), mode = "function", envir = envir) :
object 'FUN' of mode 'function' was not found