[R] The "**" exponentiation operator.

[Rolf Turner]

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?

cheers,

Rolf Turner

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Stats. Dep't. (secretaries) phone:
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