It’s often convenient to use reflection to get the value of a variable from the name as a string. In R, you can use the get function to do this.

In R :

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blog $ R
> x = 3
> get('x')
[1] 3
>

In Ruby:

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$ irb
irb(main):001:0> x = 3
=> 3
irb(main):002:0> eval 'x'
=> 3

though Ruby’s eval is more general, and is equivalent to eval in R allowing you to evaluate arbitrary code in a string.