[Rd] R CMD BATCH on scripts without trailing newline

[Jan T. Kim]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 01:39:52PM +0200, Martin Maechler wrote:

>     >> getwd()proc.time()
>     StEgl> Error: syntax error Execution halted $
> 
> aahh, now I finally understand via some people append
> those **ugly** unneeded ';' to the end of almost every line of R
> code.  It would have helped here
> :-) :-)

What is the problem with the semicolons? Ugliness is in the eye of
the beholder, evidently, but on a more objective level, terminating
statements by an explicit and visible separator seems like a very
reasonable idea to me.

>     StEgl> Is it worth changing the BATCH script so that it adds
>     StEgl> a newline before adding the call to proc.time()?
> 
> Yes I think it would be.  This is trivial, at least for 
>  <Rsrc>/src/scripts/BATCH
> Slightly better but more tricky:  only append a newline "when needed".
> Any idea for that?

I think this is a dangerous direction of thought. Having a "terminator
if apparently needed" semantics of newline has already brought us the
inconsistency of if / else parsing inside and outside of blocks. No more
of that, please.

Best regards, Jan
-- 
 +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
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