Basic Operations,
Basic Types of Data

Create, name objects

In R, everything is an object: variables, vectors, dataframes, functions, even entire environments.

Let’s create a variable named “age” that contains a single numerical value:

age = 20 # assign number 20 to variable named "age"

Now let’s simply inspect its content

age

[1] 20

# alternative way of showing content, 
# useful in programming when within functions or loops
print(age)

[1] 20

# for more complex data structures the "str" function may be useful
str(age)

 num 20

Create, name objects

Assignment operators

In R, both the assignment operator “=” and “<-” (and actually even “->”) can be used to assign values to objects. In fact, “<-” is considered more traditional in R and often preferred for clarity, also because it allows differentiating assignment from other uses of “=”.

# these two commands do the same thing 
age <- 20
age = 20

However, unlike many other teachers, I will generally favor “=” as the assignment operator in order to maintain consistency with the convention in most other programming languages

Create, name objects

Rules for naming objects in R

Strict rules:

• Start with a letter or dot (if dot, must not be followed by a number);

• Include only letters, numbers, dots, underscores;

• No reserved words (e.g., if, for, NA, function; unless placed inside backticks, e.g., `if`, but this is strongly adviced against).

Recommendations:

• Avoid names that conflict with common functions (e.g., “mean”, “sum”, “c”);

• Be concise: no length limit, but long names are difficult to read and type.

⚠️ WARNING! R is Case sensitive: age and Age will be treated as two objects!

Create, name objects

Rules for naming objects in R

Examples:

• Allowed: “age”, “age0”, “age1”, “total_score”, “.myData”, “my.data”,

• NOT allowed: “0age”, “_age”, “.0myData”, “my data”, “my-data”, “my,data”, “for”, “NA”

⚠️ WARNING! Use of “.” in object names (e.g., “my.data”) is fine in R but not allowed in Python, where “.” is part of the language syntax.

Across different languages, naming conventions for longer, multi-word variable names favor snake_case (e.g., “my_data”) or camelCase (e.g., “myData”), and abbreviations where appropriate (e.g., “unipdData” better than “university_of_padova_dataset”)… preferably used in a consistent way!

Use basic operations

R as calculator: some basic operators

(also useful: object “pi” contains 3.1415927)

Use basic operations

R as calculator: useful functions

Use basic operations

R as calculator: use of parentheses

The order of operations in R follows standard algebraic rules, unless you specify a different order using parentheses. In R, only round parentheses ( ) are used for grouping in algebraic expressions, NOT square [ ] and curly { } brackets, because they have other specific syntactic purposes.

Examples:

2 * 3 + 3^2

[1] 15

2 * (3 + 3)^2

[1] 72

(2 * (3 + 3))^2

[1] 144

Use basic operations

Relational operators

They are used to compare values and return logical values (TRUE, FALSE).

Let’s say that we defined age = 20, now let’s make a few examples:

Use basic operations

Basic logical operators

They are used to combine logical values (TRUE, FALSE).

Once again, let’s say that we defined age = 20, now let’s make a few examples:

🙂 note that logical values are internally treated as integers:

TRUE / 4

[1] 0.25

15 * FALSE

[1] 0

Basic types of data

numeric and logical

So far, we have encountered at least two types of data:

• numeric (20, 11.5, 0, 13.28157, …);

• logical/Boolean (TRUE, FALSE).

Actually, numeric data could actually be of two types: double (i.e., “double-precision floating-point”) that is with decimals like 11.5, and integer like 20.

In fact, R treats numeric values as double by default (even if without decimals). To specify numbers as integer, explicitly add an L after the number, like age = 20L (you likely will not need this, unless you explicitly need integers for some purposes, such as saving memory).

Basic types of data

characters

Another extremely important type of data is character (often called strings). This is used to store any text, and must be enclosed in quotes (' ' or " ") like this:

myName = "Enrico"

You may perform many operations with strings like:

myName == "Alexander" # is my name equal to Alexander?

[1] FALSE

myName != "Alexander" # is my name NOT equal to Alexander?

[1] TRUE

myName > "Alexander" # is my name larger than Alexander? (really?!)

[1] TRUE

Basic types of data

know the type of a variable

The typeof() function tells you what type of data you are handling:

myName = "Enrico"
prof = TRUE
coursesTaught = 4L
age = 37

# see data types
typeof(myName)

[1] "character"

typeof(prof)

[1] "logical"

typeof(coursesTaught)

[1] "integer"

typeof(age)

[1] "double"

Basic types of data

You may also inquire data type directly with functions is.*:

is.numeric(age)

[1] TRUE

is.character(age)

[1] FALSE

is.infinite(age/0)

[1] TRUE

is.logical(prof)

[1] TRUE

is.integer(coursesTaught)

[1] TRUE

is.integer(age)

[1] FALSE

is.na(myName) # checks if a value is missing (i.e., NA) 

[1] FALSE