[jghn]

Interesting. I started using it in 2000 and was working directly with members of R-core at the time. My experience was that the only time I ever saw = used was by DTL.

It really wasn’t until Google published their style guide and then later when Hadley published his that I started seeing = in heavy usage.

To your point about = being shorter I wonder if the difference was that a lot of the folks I interacted with were using Emacs with ESS which would interpolate _ to <- so they wouldn’t have noticed? Just a theory.

Either way I was taught from some of the R creators that <- was evil and to be avoided. It wasn’t until I stopped using R regularly that I switched, it became too mentally taxing to change assignment operators when I bounced between languages