R Syntax ○ Entries

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R Syntax ○｜Definition｜1st｜20260204112247-00-⌔

R (programming language) - Wikipedia#Basic_syntax

Basic syntax

The following examples illustrate the basic syntax of the language and use of the command-line interface.¹

In R, the generally preferred assignment operator is an arrow made from two characters <-, although = can be used in some cases.²

> x <- 1:6 # Create a numeric vector in the current environment
> y <- x^2 # Similarly, create a vector based on the values in x.
> y        # Print the vector’s contents.
[1]  1  4  9 16 25 36

> z <- x + y # Create a new vector that is the sum of x and y
> z # Return the contents of z to the current environment.
[1]  2  6 12 20 30 42

> z_matrix <- matrix(z, nrow = 3) # Create a new matrix that transforms the
                                 # vector z into a 3x2 matrix object
> z_matrix 
    [,1] [,2]
[1,]    2   20
[2,]    6   30
[3,]   12   42

> 2 ﹡ t(z_matrix) - 2 # Transpose the matrix; multiply every element by 2;
                     # subtract 2 from each element in the matrix; and
                     # then return the results to the terminal.
    [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2   10   22
[2,]   38   58   82

# Create a new dataframe object that contains the data from a transposed
# z_matrix, with row names 'A' and 'B'
> new_df <- data.frame(t(z_matrix), row.names = c("A", "B")) 
> names(new_df) <- c("X", "Y", "Z") # Set the column names of the new_df dataframe as X, Y, and Z.
> new_df                            # Print the current results.
  X  Y  Z
A  2  6 12
B 20 30 42

> new_df$Z # Output the Z column
[1] 12 42

> new_df$Z == new_df['Z'] && new_df[3] == new_df$Z # The dataframe column Z can be accessed using the syntax $Z, ['Z'], or [3], and the values are the same. 
[1] TRUE

> attributes(new_df) # Print information about attributes of the new_df dataframe
$names
[1] "X" "Y" "Z"

$row.names
[1] "A" "B"

$class
[1] "data.frame"

> attributes(new_df)$row.names <- c("one", "two") # Access and then change the row.names attribute; this can also be done using the rownames() function
> new_df
    X  Y  Z
one  2  6 12
two 20 30 42

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ᯤ)

Footnotes

1. An expanded list of standard language features can be found in the manual “An Introduction to R”, cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.pdf ↩

2. R Development Core Team. “Assignments with the = Operator”. Retrieved 11 September 2018. ↩

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