From maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch  Fri Feb 29 11:32:53 2008
From: maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch (Martin Maechler)
Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:32:53 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Warnings generated by log2()/log10() are really large/t
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.080227143605.Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk>
References: <971536df0802270539v44d9c99apa2e6db51941e2004@mail.gmail.com>
	<XFMail.080227143605.Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <18375.57173.255800.520830@stat.math.ethz.ch>

>>>>> "TH" == Ted Harding <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
>>>>>     on Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:36:05 -0000 (GMT) writes:

    TH> On 27-Feb-08 13:39:47, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
    >> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 5:50 AM, Henrik Bengtsson
    >> <hb at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
    >>> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:56 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
    >>> <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
    >>> > On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Martin Maechler wrote:
    >>> >
    >>> >  > Thank you Henrik,
    >>> >  >
    >>> >  >>>>>> "HenrikB" == Henrik Bengtsson <hb at stat.berkeley.edu>
    >>> >  >>>>>>     on Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:03:24 -0800 writes:
    >>> >  >
    >>> >  > {with many superfluous empty statements ( i.e., trailing ";" ):
    >>> >
    >>> >  Indeed!
    >>> 
    >>> I like to add a personal touch to the code I'm writing ;)
    >>> 
    >>> Seriously, I added them here as a bait in order to get a chance to say
    >>> that I finally found a good reason for adding the semicolons.  If you
    >>> cut'n'paste code from certain web pages it may happen that
    >>> newlines/carriage returns are not transferred and all code is pasted
    >>> into the same line at the R prompt.  With semicolons you still get a
    >>> valid syntax.  I cannot remember under what conditions this happened -
    >> 
    >> I have seen that too and many others have as well since in some forums
    >> (not related to R) its common to indent all source lines by two spaces.
    >> Any line appearing without indentation must have been wrapped.

    TH> A not-so-subtle solution to this (subtle or not) problem.

:-)

    TH> NEVER paste from a browser (or a Word doc, or anything similar)
    TH> into the R command interface. Paste only from pure plain text.

Yes.  Thank you, Ted, for your good points which I'm just
re-iterating in the following:

    TH> Therefore, if you must paste, then paste first into a window
    TH> where a pure-plain-text editor is running.

Yes; or an R-aware editor (Tinn-R, Emacs(ESS), WinEDT, ....)

    TH> Then you can see what you're getting, and can clean it up.

Yes; this gets you an ``R script file'' (ending that in '.R' is
a good choice) that you also can comment further etc etc

    TH> After that, you can paste from this directly into R, or can
    TH> save the file and source() it.

    TH> Ted.
Yes, or (better :-) once you're using an R-aware editor, you can
send parts or all of the file to the running R also more quickly.


Using R code in *files* that you save, comment, re-evaluate, ...
IMO is still *the* way to do (almost) anything serious with R.

Using extraneous ";" at the end of lines, just to allow
something which is not at all recommendable
is not a good reason IMO.
Martin



[Rd] Warnings generated by log2()/log10() are really large/t
Martin Maechler