[Rd] Patch proposal for R style consistency (concerning deparse.c)

Terry Therneau therneau at mayo.edu
Thu May 2 14:26:24 CEST 2013


I'll be the "anybody" to argue that
      }  else {
is an ugly kludge which you will never find in my source code.  Yes, it's necessary at the 
command line because the parser needs help in guessing when an expression is finished, but 
is only needed in that case.  Since I can hardly imagine using else at the command line 
(that many correct characters in a row exceeds my typing skill) it's not an issue for me.  
I most certainly would not inflict this construction on my pupils when teaching a class, 
nor that any break of a long line has to be after "+" but not before, nor other crutches 
for the parser's sake.  Let them know about the special case of course, but don't 
sacrifice good coding style the deficiency.

That said, I am completely ambivalent to the result of deparse.  Just throwing up an 
objection to the "purity" argument: things were beginning to sound a bit too bombastic :-).

Terry T.

On 05/02/2013 05:00 AM, r-devel-request at r-project.org wrote:
>   I want "} else {".  Yihue wants "} else {".  And I have not heard anybody
> say they prefer the other way, unless you interpret Duncan's comment
> "that's nonsense" as a blanket defense of the status quo. But I don't think
> he meant that.  This is a matter of style consistency and avoidance of new
> R-user confusion and error.



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