When assigning values to an entire column, if the comma is omitted, the assignment is made to the row instead.
For example:
> dat <- data.frame(diag(100))
> x <- BigDataFrame(data=dat)
> x[1] <- 3
> x[1:5, 1:5]
X1 X2 X3 X4 X5
1 3 3 3 3 3
2 0 1 0 0 0
3 0 0 1 0 0
4 0 0 0 1 0
5 0 0 0 0 1