As a reader, I often want to run the code by myself _while_ I'm reading a particular part of an article/report. I find it convenient to be able to copy the code as I'm reading it, instead of minimizing my current window, opening an R script, and running the part that I'm interested in. Of course, this may not work if the code I copy is not self-contained; your purl() approach certainly has an advantage sometimes.
I do not see a whole lot of value in maintaining the same appearance of the R code in the R console and a report. You can teach your students what the prompt characters mean, and I think that is enough. Journal of Statistical Software requires "R> " as the prompt character (which is worse), and your students will probably be confused when reading JSS papers if they have been seeing the default prompts all the time. I see the point of keeping prompts (i.e. I do not completely disagree), but I do not think it is an essential or important thing to do. Personally I prefer reading "vanilla" code, and >/+ may confuse my eyes occasionally, e.g. > z > 5 > x + + y (More on prompts: http://yihui.name/en/2013/01/code-pollution-with-command-prompts/) Re Rich: yes, I'm aware of approaches of post-processing the prompts, but this problem would not have existed in the first place if we do not include prompts at all. I'm not sure if it makes much sense to create some mess and clean it afterwards. Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyi...@gmail.com> Web: http://yihui.name On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Greg Snow <538...@gmail.com> wrote: > My preference when teaching is to have the code and results look the > same as it appears in the R console window, so with the prompts and > without the output commented. But then I also `purl` my knitr file to > create a script file to give to the students that they can copy and > paste from easily. > ______________________________________________ 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.