[Rd] Status of "**" operator

[Marc Schwartz]

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