On Tue, 26 Aug 2025 at 11:06, 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?
Not a rational basis perhaps, but when I teach R to our newbie students who all want to learn Python, I have fun pointing out that ** is the official way to exponentiate in Python, and ^ does something quite crazy. So keeping ** around in R might make it a tad bit more welcoming to Pythonistas. Best, -Deepayan > 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 > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
