Since I read digests, and don't read mail on weekends, I come to this
discussion late. It was very entertaining.
I only wish to comment on 2 points. The first is Henrich's (I
believe) one that trying to convert an old-time user to new styles is
futile. I agree wholeheartedly. As proof I offer the survival suite
--anyone who peruses it will notice a different indentation rule for
closing braces. Why? It's the style I started with, one that is very
natural to anyone whose first indented language was PL/I. I may be the
only person in the world who indents R that way, and still I haven't
changed, i.e., even an irrefutable argument may not be enough.
The second is if-else. Once the S authors decided not to have a
statement terminator, e.g. the semicolon in C, their fate was sealed:
when in interactive mode the language has to guess wrt to the end of a
statment, and it is impossible to devise a parsing strategy that will
always guess correctly. In non-interactive mode there is no problem
with if-else since it can read ahead. That said, for functions I much
prefer "readability" to "write to help out the parser", and put the else
on a separate line.
But even inside a function it is not always possible to know what the
writer intended:
zed <- function(x,y,z) {
x + y
+z
}
The authors borrowed so much else from C, the semicolon would have been
good too.
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