Typing function arguments in R?

Question

I wrote the following snippet of code:

b=function(x=numeric()){print(x)}

What does x=numeric() do?

b('i') and b(3) both produce the correct output.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You are specifying a default argument of numeric() , which I believe is just a numeric vector.

Thus, if you call the function with no arguments, that parameter will default to numeric() .

If your question is about how to force arguments to be a particular type (as your title implies), then you want to look at this question .