syntax - In R, what does a negative index do?

Question

I am porting part of a program (not enough to compile and run) from R to C++. I am not familiar with R. I have done okay using the references online, but was stumped by the following line:

cnt2.2<-cnt2[,-1]

I am guessing:

1. cnt2 is a 2 dimensional matrix
2. cnt2.2 is a new variable being declared with a period '.' used the same way an alphabetic character would be.
3. <- is an assignment.
4. [,-1] accesses part of the array. I thought [,5] meant all rows, 5th column only. If this is correct, I have no idea what -1 refers to.

Answer 1

This is covered in section 2.7 of the manual: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html#Index-vectors

It is a negative index into the cnt2 object specifying all rows and all columns except the first column.