Having grown up and aged in linux, c, bash, and perl households, I felt that R lacked constructs to allow concise ways of getting down to business.
I became tired of typing quote-comma-quote and missed perl's qw function that compactly transforms its argument of strings separated by white space into an array.
I came up with this alternative:
qwa<-function(...) as.character(match.call(expand.dots=TRUE))[-1] # discard the "qwa" function call
# a simple example
qwa(a,b,c)
# [1] "a" "b" "c"
# including quoted strings
qwa(This,That,"some other thing")
# [1] "This" "That" "some other thing"
# and more complex expressions
qwa(1,2,3,c(1,2,3),function(...) "z")
# [1] "1" "2" "3"
# [4] "c(1, 2, 3)" "function(...) \"z\""
I suppose it's possible to recursively do.call down the expressions to return a tree/list, but I called it a day.
J. Bullock's qw function also divides a string argument by whitespace to return a character vector.
Please let me know if there's a better way to go about this. Appreciate feedback/comments