Do not syntax highlight T/F in R?

[kylebutts]

Currently, the grammer highlights the token T or F as being a boolean in R. On a fresh session, T is converted to TRUE, but it's dangerous as a variable assigned to T overwrites this behavior and can cause code to fail.

The syntax highlighting can be misleading in this regard and I think should be removed from the grammar.

[littlemingone]

If you hate someone, edit his .Rprofile and make

T <- FALSE
F <- TRUE

Overloading the variable T is technically feasible, but it is likely to cause confusion. I believe any reasonable person wouldn’t resort to this.
For those who overload the variable T of F, an incorrect syntax highlighting is merely the most trivial drawback.

For the vast majority of R users, T stands for TRUE. Therefore, I believe this syntax highlighting should be retained rather than being corrected for the rare, unnecessary, and weird edge cases where it might be wrong. After all, it's just an incorrect syntax highlight; it doesn't affect code execution or the code itself.

[kylebutts]

Overloading the variable T is technically feasible, but it is likely to cause confusion. I believe any reasonable person wouldn’t resort to this.

In statistics, T is the number of time periods and is used all the time.

[jennybc]

(BTW I'm fully on team "TRUE and FALSE, never T and F".)

From "An Introduction to R" (https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-patched/R-intro.html#Logical-vectors-1):

... T and F are just variables which are set to TRUE and FALSE by default, but are not reserved words and hence can be overwritten by the user. Hence, you should always use TRUE and FALSE.

So it does seem reasonable to me to not treat T and F like reserved words, since they are not reserved words, but are just variables. I believe that would just mean removing T and F here (everything else here is an actual reserved word):

positron/extensions/positron-r/syntaxes/r.tmGrammar.gen.json

Lines 268 to 269 in bf88542

	"match": "(?:NA_character_|NA_integer_|NA_complex_|NA_real_|TRUE|FALSE|NULL|Inf|NaN|NA|T|F)\\b"
	},

[kylebutts]

I believe that would just mean removing T and F here (everything else here is an actual reserved word):

I think so too

[juliasilge]

Thanks, all! 🙌 I've got a PR up to change this: #10645