General Coding Practices

Naming objects

• When naming objects, use underscores ("_"), not periods (".") or CamelCase.

• Check out the styler package for more information.

If stop statements

• Within functions and for loops, it is good practice to include an "if stop" statement and error message. If there is a specific error in the code, the loop will stop and return a message, as shown in the example below:

if(my_year < 2007){
      stop("Invalid range of years.", immediate. = TRUE)
    }

• This makes the debugging process considerably less stressful!
• R also has the stopifnot function. See the example below:

stopifnot(1 == 1, all.equal(pi, 3.14159265), 1 < 2) # all TRUE