[R] The "**" exponentiation operator.

[Ian Worthington]

Hi Rolf --
For your consideration:  One of things the R community doesn't emphasise as much as some other (more commercially focussed?) language communities is the importance of automated testing.  Hadley has written that that everything should live in packages which then enables this easily, but, if you, like I, have a project that's a mixed bag of scripts, notebooks, and other gubbins, you then end up fighting the packaging rules.  Notwithstanding, it's relatively easy to do testing without the packaging overhead and this would then solve not only your asterisk duplication problem but also catch a whole host of other problems with programs not working quite the way they were intended it.
Just a thought. 

Best wishes / Mejores deseos /  Meilleurs vœux

Ian ... 

    On Tuesday, August 26, 2025 at 07:36:11 AM GMT+2, Rolf Turner <rolfturner using posteo.net> wrote:  
 
 

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:
        +64-9-373-7599 ext. 89622
Home phone: +64-9-480-4619

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