R devel - May 2021 - Status of "**" operator

Hi All,

I was just sent some older R code from circa 2004, which contains the 
use of the "**" operator, which is parsed as "^".

 From looking at ?"**", I see the following in the Note section:

"** 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."


In using R 4.1.0:

 > 2**3
[1] 8

the operator is still accepted in 2021.

Thus, has there been any discussion regarding the deprecation of this 
operator, or should the help file at least be updated to reflect the 
status in 2021?

Thanks,

Marc Schwartz

On 21/05/2021 16:01, Marc Schwartz via R-devel wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I was just sent some older R code from circa 2004, which contains the 
> use of the "**" operator, which is parsed as "^".
> 
>  From looking at ?"**", I see the following in the Note section:
> 
> "** 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."
> 
> 
> In using R 4.1.0:
> 
>  > 2**3
> [1] 8
> 
> the operator is still accepted in 2021.
> 
> Thus, has there been any discussion regarding the deprecation of this 
> operator, or should the help file at least be updated to reflect the 
> status in 2021?
Not really: there is no guarantee that it will be accepted for all of 
2021.  As it is deprecated and AFAIK untested, it could be broken at any 
time.  OTOH, no one has mentioned in my hearing a wish to actually 
remove it.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford