title: Cannot create an empty vector and append new elements in R
body: <p>I am just beginning to learn R and am having an issue that is leaving me fairly confused. My goal is to create an empty vector and append elements to it. Seems easy enough, but solutions that I have seen on stackoverflow don't seem to be working.</p>
  
  <p>To wit,</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;     a &lt;- numeric()
  &gt;     append(a,1)
  [1] 1
  &gt;     a
  numeric(0)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can't quite figure out what I'm doing wrong. Anyone want to help a newbie?</p>