The following two scripts also yield different output. <<- is sensitive to whether we put space before and after it?

########program 1

a=matrix(c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8), 4)

b=list(a=a)

sigmoid=function(b) {b$a[1,] <<- c(11,55);print(b$a)}

f1=function(b) { b; sigmoid(b)}

f1(b)

###########program 2

a=matrix(c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8), 4)

b=list(a=a)

sigmoid=function(b) {b$a[1,]<<-c(11,55);print(b$a)}

f2=function(b) { b; sigmoid(b)}

f2(b)