make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

[yihui]

https://github.com/richfitz/sowsear

users can start with a pure R script which looks like stitch() but the sow's ear is more flexible

[tbates]

That's a great idea! means that the user can work in R mostly as they do now, hiding text in comments, but then switch to markdown with a knit(thisFile, sows_ear=T)

Bit like Roxygen, without the weird #' meta comment :-)

[yihui]

I think #' is a good choice for writing normal texts, so I just used it. See https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/master/inst/examples/knitr-silk.R for example

[richfitz]

Can I suggest at least parsing ## as a equivalent? ESS makes the distinction between # and ## comments, and a largish number of users will find that default difficult to use.

[yihui]

#' is much more unambiguous than ##; users are likely to write ## when they mean ordinary comments instead of literate content

both Javadoc and Doxygen uses special comments like /** */ or /*! */ to denote documentation, and the idea is to avoid ambiguity with ordinary comments

#' is not difficult to use with ESS at all -- it is automatically added to the next line, and the roxygen comments can be rearranged by M-q (ESS uses ##', though, and you can also use double-hash here); other editors like RStudio also supports roxygen comments

one, two and three # only apply to alignment of comments in ESS; I actually dislike the ESS convention that # is centered

[github-actions]

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