On 12 Aug 2003, Douglas Bates wrote: > "nels.tomlinson.1" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > I'd like to propose that now that the underscore-as-assignment-operator > > is to be removed from R (good thing, too), that the Windows GUI should > > replace the underscore ``_'' with the proper assignment operator ``<-'' > > when you type in the underscore character. > > > > This is the current default behaviour in the ESS mode in emacs, and seems > > to me to be a generally good idea. If no one can come up with a good > > reason not to do this, I hope that the maintainers of the GUI will put it > > on their to-do list. > > One of the purposes of deprecating then disallowing the underscore as an > assignment character is to allow its use in names.
And it is already valid in character strings and inside quoted (including by backslashes) non-syntactic names. The GUI frontend would need to parse its input to reliably substitute -- ESS does try to do that, but I don't think it is 100% successful. (It doesn't know about backticks, at least in the version I have installed, for example.) In short: this would be days of work to do right, so it is not going to happen. > I hope that the maintainers of the GUI will put it > on their to-do list. That's not the best response. `Here is a set of patches for you to consider' is more likely to succeed. Take a look at the R start-up banner and aspire to becoming one of those contributors! -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
