[R] Turning on helpful errors in interpreter? was Re: problem with simple if() statement

[Patricia J. Hawkins]

Evidently, my R has some feature of error messages disabled.

>>>>> "NG" == Norman Goodacre <taranpen at yahoo.co.uk> writes:

NG> the following code apprantely, for some grand old reason, induces a syntax error:
NG>   if (seq[i] = "A") m <- trans[1,]

NG>   Error: syntax error in "if (seq[i] ="

Where Norman gets this nice error message pointing to the exact
location of the error, all I get is:

> if (1=1) 5
Error: syntax error
>

How do I turn on more-verbose error messages? Is this an environmental
issue, or a build issue?

This is a debian (ubuntu breezy) build; happens even when I run R --vanilla

R.version
         _                
platform i486-pc-linux-gnu
arch     i486             
os       linux-gnu        
system   i486, linux-gnu  
status                    
major    2                
minor    1.1              
year     2005             
month    06               
day      20               
language R                

TIA!

-- 
Patricia J. Hawkins
Hawkins Internet Applications
www.hawkinsia.com