R has a rich heritage of trolling unsuspecting programmers coming from other languages. In ancient versions of R from the early 2000s, the underscore operator

R has a rich heritage of trolling unsuspecting programmers coming from other languages. In ancient versions of R from the early 2000s, the underscore operator was synonymous for '<-', aka assignment. This is why in R some use periods for separators (ice.cream) rather than underscores (ice_cream), though just to make things more lulzy some package authors have started to use Java style camel case (iceCream) too. I saw an example of R code using underscore for assignment posted on twitter a couple of months ago. See if you can make heads or tails of this: http://www.stat.washington.edu/hoff/Code/hoff_raftery_handcock_2002_jasa/dist.r http://www.stat.washington.edu/hoff/Code/hoff_raftery_handco...