[R] Block comments in R?

Peter Dalgaard p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk
Mon Oct 9 09:04:08 CEST 2006


"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> writes:

> We find
>     - languages which have copied PL/I  (/* ... */)
>     - languages which have copied BCPL (//)
>     - languages which have copied Pascal (* ... *)

Not to stick my head further into the discussion at this point, but
actually, original Pascal has {...} for comments. The diglyphs (* and
*) were used on systems like Pascal 1100 in Copenhagen, where the
UNIVAC "Fieldata" 6-bit (!) character set didn't contain curlies. (We
also used (. .) for array indexing because [\] had been replaced by
Danish characters.)

>     - languages which have copied sh (#)
>     - languages which have copied Burroughs Algol (%)
>     - Fortran (only ever end-of-line comments, first C and now !)
>     - BASIC (only end-of-line ' and REM comments, and you would certainly
>       have to call VB.net "recent")
>     - eclectic languages
> 
>     - languages designed for high reliability, notably Ada and Eiffel (--)


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: (+45) 35327907



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