It’s a challenge for an experienced user to remember what it was like to be totally new to R and come up with explanations that don’t draw on understanding developed subsequently. Terminology with which you have become very familiar is, in fact, jargon. So I asked a novice, Elliot, to explain a piece of code in his own words. Elliot is a 17 year old student half way through a BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Science which is a qualification which provides access to Higher Education in the UK.
I have annotated with the jargon. In doing so I realised that the c() function is perhaps not the best example but that’s for another post.
R code Anatomy – a nice big image
Emma R 