R Programming By Example
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Complex logic with control structures

The final topic we should cover is how to introduce complex logic by using control structures. When I write introduce complex logic, I don't mean to imply that it's complex to do so. Complex logic refers to code that has multiple possible paths of execution, but in reality, it's quite simple to implement it.

Nearly every operation in R can be written as a function, and these functions can be passed through to other functions to create very complex behavior. However, it isn't always convenient to implement logic that way and using simple control structures may be a better option sometimes.

The control structures we will look at are if... else conditionals, for loops, and while loops. There are also switch conditionals, which are very much like if... else conditionals, but we won't look at them since we won't use them in the examples contained in this book.