If you want to post code into the comments and stop WordPress from interpreting the symbols, then use the tags.

Why can’t the comment box do WISIWIG?

The point I was trying to make is that in current versions of R you can use a simple “=” instead of the more cumbersome “less_than hyphen” symbol combination as the assignment operator:

temp = (landfall$wind>=65) is the same as
temp “less_than hyphen” (landfall$wind>=65)

Steve writes R scripts using “=65)
and
temp = (landfall$wind>=65)

are identical. If, like me, you grew up on languages like Basic and Fortran, the latter is easier to read – and it is definitely easier to type!

(When you really want to say “equals” as opposed to “is assigned the value of the following expession”, the operator is “==”, as in: if (a == b))

I cut and paste the line with landfall and read.table (less than sign omitted here for fear of unintended blog consequences) into a script on my computer. I ran it and received the following error:

Error: object “landfall” not found

I deleted a spurious appearing space between the less than sign and the subsequent – sign, and the line appeared to execute okay. I did this with subsequent lines that I cut and paste from this thread and they also appeared to execute okay. When I got down to plotting using the par statement, it failed.

Error: syntax error in ” plot(1851:2006,count,type=”"

Not expecting you to waste your valuable time on my baby steps with R, but if you see something obvious I would appreciate a redirect.