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Strange code in `?`

2 messages · Philippe GROSJEAN, Martin Becker

Original
Philippe GROSJEAN
# 
Hello,

In R 2.10, looking at:

 > `?`
function (e1, e2)
{
     if (missing(e2)) {
         type <- NULL
         topicExpr <- substitute(e1)
     }
     else {
         type <- substitute(e1)
         topicExpr <- substitute(e2)
     }
     if (is.call(topicExpr) && topicExpr[[1L]] == "?") {
         search <- TRUE
         topicExpr <- topicExpr[[2L]]
         if (is.call(topicExpr) && topicExpr[[1L]] == "?" && 
is.call(topicExpr[[2L]]) &&
             topicExpr[[2L]][[1L]] == "?") {
             cat("Contacting Delphi...")
             flush.console()
             Sys.sleep(2 + rpois(1, 2))
             cat("the oracle is unavailable.\nWe apologize for any 
inconvenience.\n")
             return(invisible())
         }
     }

[...]

I am especially puzzled by this part:

cat("Contacting Delphi...")
flush.console()
Sys.sleep(2 + rpois(1, 2))
cat("the oracle is unavailable.\nWe apologize for any inconvenience.\n")

We now got jokes in R code? Why not? ;-)
Best,

Philippe
Martin Becker
# 
I don't know if this is really a joke. It is certainly not easy to answer
   `?`(`?`(`?`(`?`(`?`))))
and spending some time trying to contact Delphi (maybe in order to 
permit cosmic radiation to feed the solution into the computer's RAM) is 
possibly one of the most promising approaches ;-)

Best,
  Martin
Philippe Grosjean wrote: