[ESS] proposal re: underscore, part 2

[Vitalie Spinu]

Sorry, I was not very explicit there. This new behavior will not be the
default and of course it's still open to discussion.

>>>> Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit at gmail.com>
>>>> on Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:24:36 +0200 wrote:

  > Hi, 

  > It's a pity we cannot have non-ess users opinion here:)

  > From the next version of ESS you will get smart SPC which will correct
  > whatever mess is before the cursor and also indent:

  > "foo_"  into "foo <- "
  > "foo="  into "foo = "
  > "foo<-" into "foo <- "

  > and so on. Of course fully customized. 

  > Originally I was thinking to implement a full set of smart operators,
  > but following Henning's suggestion it appeared to me that a very smart
  > SPACE should be pretty much enough for everything. It's also easier to
  > customize and considerably less intrusive.

  > Best, 
  > Vitalie.

>>>> Jack Tanner <ihok at hotmail.com>
>>>> on Mon, 9 Apr 2012 15:11:40 +0000 wrote:

  >> Following up on whether to leave the underscore situation
  >> unchanged, I tallied up the mailing list responses (bottom of
  >> this message). Please pardon me if I misinterpreted anyone's
  >> thoughts.

  >> People seemed to rally around the compromise to create a new
  >> option to bind "<-" insertion to another key. This would satisfy
  >> my original request with respect to editing R buffers, but it
  >> would not help with editing BUGS / JAGS code, and it would not
  >> help ESS novices. If I could rebind smart-underscore and if it
  >> could be disabled for BUGS / JAGS altogether, that would help me,
  >> at least.

  >> Parenthetically, I agree that "<-" is the preferred style of
  >> writing assignment in R, and I use it in my own code. But I
  >> disagree that smart-underscore is a good way of teaching that.

  >> Henning Redestig points out that pasting code containing true
  >> underscores into an ESS R buffer with smart-underscore enabled
  >> will mess up the code. That seems like a serious bug, but it
  >> could perhaps be decoupled from this issue. Henning suggests to
  >> activate smart-underscore only if an underscore is followed by a
  >> space. This change would trigger the pasting bug less often than
  >> the status quo, but it will still snag legal identifiers such
  >> as "foo_".

  >> Here's my tally of the posts on this. Folks that seem to think
  >> that the status quo is problematic in some way:

  >> Vitalie Spinu
  >> Henning Redestig
  >> Chris Evans
  >> Jack Tanner

  >> Folks that are OK with the status quo, but would accept a new
  >> option to bind "<-" insertion to some other key:

  >> Rainer Krug
  >> Richard M. Heiberger
  >> Joshua Wiley
  >> Gerald Jean

  >> Folks that would rather see no changes:

  >> Brendan Halpin
  >> Rodney Sparapani
  >> Tim Hesterberg
  >> Martin Maechler

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