should the text for RIGHT_ASSIGN be -> in getParseData()?

Is there any reason right-assign with "->" still exists? How much
code on CRAN uses it, and how trivially could it be excised?
I use '->' a lot when doing interactive work.  I often first run a command
to see its printed output then decide that I had better save its value.
The up-arrow key gives me the previous command line with the cursor placed at the
end of the line so adding '-> z' at the end of the line is convenient.
(Not using the up-arrow key and doing 'z <- .Last.value' also works, but
I don't like its context sensitivity.)
But up-arrow, ctrl-A then "z <-" is not much less convenient, is it? 

I have used in with multi-line input, occasionally, though. As in

replicate(10000, {
   ysim <- rbinom(length(p), n, p)
   glm(cbind(ysim, n - ysim) ~ x, binomial)$deviance 
})

... and then you realize that you probably don't want to look at 10000 simulated deviances and add "-> simDev".
I never use '->' when writing code in a file, so you would have to search
my .Rhistory files, not my *.R files, for evidence of its usefulness to me.

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf
Of Barry Rowlingson
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2013 9:29 AM
To: Duncan Murdoch
Cc: R-devel
Subject: Re: [Rd] should the text for RIGHT_ASSIGN be -> in getParseData()?

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:

R itself doesn't make use of the text column, it's for display of code
by highlighters etc.  So if anyone does assume text is a function name,
it's their bug, not ours.  In fact, the bug is already there, because
there is actually one other example which was being parsed properly,
"**" is translated to "^".  There's no `**` function, but 2**3 works.
Is there any reason right-assign with "->" still exists? How much
code on CRAN uses it, and how trivially could it be excised? Can we
also have 'up assign'  and "down assign" so I can do:

   3
x -^
x -v
   4
- they make just as much sense.

Okay, lets see all the edge cases.....

Barry

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should the text for RIGHT_ASSIGN be -> in getParseData()?

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