Please let's not waste any time trying to figure out how to add block comments to R. In any guise they are highly error prone. Although its precursors (PL/I and Pascal) had block comments and did not have end-of-line comments, the programming language Ada was explicitly designed to have end-of-line comments and not block comments, as block comments were thought too easy to write incorrectly and too easy to misread.
As just one example, the version of vim I have does syntax highlighting, BUT "Vim doesn't parse the whole file", so if you have code in the middle of a block comment it may be highlighed incorrectly. Commenting code out and providing documentation comments are easily done with a good editor, although R documentation comments really belong in files where help() can find them. In the text editor I use, comment-region (using end-of-line comments) and uncomment-region (ditto) are just two keystrokes each; it's LESS effort than writing block comment delimiters would be. Also, when writing a big comment, the newline key automatically copies <white space>*(<end of line comment mark> <white space>*)? to the beginning of a new line, so again it is less typing to make a block comment using end-of-line comments than /* ... */ or anything like that, and of course fill-paragraph and justify-paragraph (two keystrokes each) can cope with the comment marks (a change from lines with comment marks to ones without, or vice versa, constitutes a paragraph break). ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
