Assignment in R language

Question

I am wondering how assignment works in the R language.

Consider the following R shell session:

> x <- c(5, 6, 7)
> x[1] <- 10
> x
[1] 10 6         


        

Answer 1

As per @Owen's answer to this question, x[1] <- 10 is really doing two things. It is calling the [<- function, and it is assigning the result of that call to x.

So what you want to achieve your c(4, 5, 6)[1] <- 10 result is:

> `[<-`(c(4, 5, 6),1, 10)
[1] 10  5  6