Rolf et al.,
While removing the ** syntax may fell attractive, removing it will cause legacy
program to abend. This is not what one wants from a programming language. It
might be better to add code to the parser that produces a wanting message that
the ** syntax is not optimal and should be replaced with ^, but which allow
legacy programs to run, albeit with a warning message. This will allow old
programs to keep running and will prevent Rolf's fumbling finger from fatal
flaws.
Your toughts?
John
John David Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
Professor of Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine;
Associate Director for Biostatistics and Informatics, Baltimore VA Medical
Center Geriatrics Research, Education, and Clinical Center;
PI Biostatistics and Informatics Core, University of Maryland School of
Medicine Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center;
Senior Statistician University of Maryland Center for Vascular Research;
Division of Gerontology and Paliative Care,
10 North Greene Street
GRECC (BT/18/GR)
Baltimore, MD 21201-1524
Cell phone 443-418-5382
________________________________________
From: R-help <r-help-boun...@r-project.org> on behalf of Ian Worthington via
R-help <r-help@r-project.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2025 3:21 AM
To: r-help@r-project.org <r-help@r-project.org>; Rolf Turner
<rolftur...@posteo.net>
Subject: Re: [R] The "**" exponentiation operator.
Hi Rolf --
For your consideration: One of things the R community doesn't emphasise as
much as some other (more commercially focussed?) language communities is the
importance of automated testing. Hadley has written that that everything
should live in packages which then enables this easily, but, if you, like I,
have a project that's a mixed bag of scripts, notebooks, and other gubbins, you
then end up fighting the packaging rules. Notwithstanding, it's relatively
easy to do testing without the packaging overhead and this would then solve not
only your asterisk duplication problem but also catch a whole host of other
problems with programs not working quite the way they were intended it.
Just a thought.
Best wishes / Mejores deseos / Meilleurs vœux
Ian ...
On Tuesday, August 26, 2025 at 07:36:11 AM GMT+2, Rolf Turner
<rolftur...@posteo.net> wrote:
On more than one occasion I have got myself into trouble by
fumble-fingering and typing "**" when I intended to type "*".
Unfortunately the expression produced is syntactically correct and the
consequent incorrect results were difficult (for me) to disentangle.
I would be much happier if the "**" operator were simply not allowed,
and threw an error. It seems to me that the existence of the "**"
operator is an archaism, probably deriving from Fortran.
The documentation, obtained from ?Arithmetic, says at one point:
> ** is translated in the parser to ^, but this was undocumented for
> many years. It appears as an index entry in Becker et al. (1988),
> pointing to the help for Deprecated but is not actually mentioned on
> that page. Even though it had been deprecated in S for 20 years, it
> was still accepted in R in 2008.
It seems still be accepted in R in 2025.
Would there be any mileage in asking R Core to deprecate "**", or
better still make it defunct? Can there be any rational basis for
keeping "**" around?
cheers,
Rolf Turner
--
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Stats. Dep't. (secretaries) phone:
+64-9-373-7599 ext. 89622
Home phone: +64-9-480-4619
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