[Rd] Status of "**" operator

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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 using stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford