?if (PR#3179)

What makes you think that is a bug?

?"if" and help("if") work

`An Introduction to R' says

For a feature specified by special characters, the argument must be
enclosed in double or single quotes, making it a ``character string'':

and that is true for a few other examples, as all good books (e.g. 
MASS) point out.

hello dear [R] experts,

I use [R] 1.7.0 on Unix and have noticed that I could'nt load the help 
of the function "if" with the command

 >?if

+
+

or the command

 > help(if)

Error: syntax error

I deeply thank you and congratulate you for all your work,
[R] is a wonderfull programm :-)

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

What makes you think that is a bug?

?"if" and help("if") work

`An Introduction to R' says

For a feature specified by special characters, the argument must be
enclosed in double or single quotes, making it a ``character string'':

To be precise, we should probably insert "or a reserved word"
in that sentence. 

The point is that parsing occurs prior to the logic that runs help on
the (deparsed) argument, so it's technically no different from "-if"
or "!for" which are also syntactically invalid. The question mark is
just another operator at this stage.

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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