I am still researching my best choices. IMHO, every programming and every typesetting language ever invented should have had a compatible basic escape sequence built in. simple. just compatible with one another. something like a specific escape sequence on the first column, like
#%@@==R means that now an R segment starts. #%@@==LaTeX means that now a LaTeX segment starts. (markdown and html are other good text language choices. for programming, markdown or markup would usually make most sense.) maybe '#if' would have been better. it is escaped in many languages, except TeX and C, of course. or '//R'. or '%%R'. whatever. IF ONLY every language had used '#' as its comment character, it would have been a good start. the source could then be run through any compiler or typesetter and every one would know what is meant for it. if no such escapes are in the source, then the executable would assume it owns the whole source. any compiles should/could decide to ignore sections not meant for it. importantly, your favorite editor or ide would know how to highlight the regions. right now, the world is a mess. perl escapes from perl to docs with =POD commands; doxygen2 escapes from R to docs with #' commands on every line; latex escapes with \verb+ commands, well sort of. html escapes with <pre> commands, but what is in between must not contain certain sequences. C escapes with '#if 0'. there is really a benefit to standardization here, but the world's standardization bodies are too unstandardized to make this feasible. so I am contemplating---do I want R code that can be processed to spit out some latex, or latex code that can be processed to spit out some R, or my own code that can become both latex and R? I could live with rolling my own IF ONLY my ide/editor would understand my new format. I do not have the skills to tell emacs how to switch syntax-highlighting in the middle of files. this collective path-dependence will plague us for decades, having created a cost without a benefit. /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.we...@gmail.com) ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.