The Art of R Programming

Writing Your Own Binary Operations

You can invent your own operations! Just write a function whose name begins and ends with %, with two arguments of a certain type, and a return value of that type.

For example, here’s a binary operation that adds double the second operand to the first:

> "%a2b%" <- function(a,b) return(a+2*b)
> 3 %a2b% 5
[1] 13

A less trivial example is given in the section about set operations in Section 8.5.