Can names still contain hyphen? (Lesson 8)

[thjbdvlt]

I am reading this as someone who is learning R since a few days, and i just read in the README.md here (lesson 8) that

Names must begin with a letter, and consist only of letters, digits and a few special characters such as '-' or '.'

Do names can contains hyphens in special situations that I am not aware of? Or maybe recent R versions (I am using 4.4) changed something about that (as the underscore was added)? In my R version, something like a-b <- 3 produces an error (undefined symbol: a).

[matloff]

To be honest, I don't know the answer (which could easily be looked up). My fasteR tutorial AVOIDS that kind of thing, i.e. it consciously avoids starting out with "R variables can be of mode numeric, integer, character and logical. Variable names must start with a letter..." That slows down the learning process, for no good reason IMO.

I like to use names of the form abcDeF, e.g. originalColor and newColor, starting with a lower-case letter and using capitals as punctuation. I hate using _ in names, as it requires that I hunt on the keyboard for that character. :-(