The ongoing search for the "Perfect Black Pen"

Partially inspired by this post, I've decided to blog my continuing search for the "Perfect Black Pen".

My own personal ideal has 3 main points:
(1) fine-point smooth dark ink (0.38mm Uniball Signo)
(2) retractable
(3) nicely weighted slim metal body (like a nice drafting pencil)

The ability to write smoothly in a dark ink is the biggest priority and is also the biggest restriction on the latter two, because gel pens have the nasty property of being quite wide, which means they don't fit very well in slim metal bodies (not that many of those even exist for pens).

Right now I use a silver-body G2 Limited with a black 0.38mm Uniball Signo cartridge. The pen looks nice and writes very well, but the body is still quite cheap (in comparison to nice drafting pencils). In particular, the metal body feels like an alloy of some sort (instead of brushed aluminum or stainless steel), and there is a preponderance of plastic parts that feel cheap (namely, the clip, tip, and clicker). The body is also not slim enough to fit in my organizer, which is a bit problematic, since I would really like to replace the Pentel ballpoint I have in there right now.

Why I hate programming (part 2 of n)

The difference between using "=" and "<-" for assignment in R:

It seems that, historically, "=" was not allowed for variable assignment. My understanding is that in modern R, using "=" for assignment is (mostly) equivalent to using "<-", so that:

x = 2      % This line is the same as
x <- 2     % this line.

However, one should be aware that when using "=" to give parameters for functions, assignments do not occur (in the global workspace):

x <- rep(2, times=5)     % "times" does not have value 5
times                    % gives an error
x <- rep(2, times<-5)    % "times" IS set to have value 5
times                    % this will have value 5

There's also some weird differences with how "<-" and "=" get interpreted (maybe has to do with order of operations / syntactic sugar?):

x = y = 5      % both "x" and "y" will have value 5
x <- y <- 5    % both "x" and "y" will have value 5
x = y <- 5     % both "x" and "y" will have value 5
x <- y = 5     % gives an error

This is what R's documentation has to say about this nonsense:
"The operators <- and = assign into the environment in which they are evaluated. The operator <- can be used anywhere, whereas the operator = is only allowed at the top level (e.g., in the complete expression typed at the command prompt) or as one of the subexpressions in a braced list of expressions."