Diagnose Programming-Language Names in DESCRIPTION

Flags a bare programming-language or statistical-computing name – Python, Java, JavaScript, Rust, MATLAB, SAS, Stata and more – in Title or Description that CRAN asks to see single-quoted. This is the language counterpart to lab_software_names(): both are policy-tier quoting checks, kept separate because a language name and a package name are different kinds of thing. R itself is never flagged in either form. No authority names it, and a bare R and a quoted 'R' both clear CRAN, so checktor takes no position on which you write. Single-letter or common-word names (C, Go, Swift) are left out because they cannot be told from ordinary prose.

Usage

lab_language_names(path = ".", verbose = TRUE, desc = NULL)

Arguments

path: Character. Path to the package directory. Default: ".".
verbose: Logical. Print diagnostic output. Default: TRUE.
desc: Optional pre-parsed DESCRIPTION, as returned by base::read.dcf(). Defaults to reading it from path.

Value

checktor_check_result() with passed, issues, message.

Details

Data, markup and query formats (JSON, HTML, YAML, SQL, Markdown, LaTeX and the like) and the languages CRAN packages write either way (C++, Fortran, Tcl) are not flagged here. A census of CRAN in September 2026 found that packages accepted at new-package review in the previous 18 months wrote them bare 62% of the time, against 28% for the languages this check covers, so a bare one is not a policy finding. lab_format_names() reports them when you ask.

A package can extend the list through Config/checktor/language_names in its own DESCRIPTION.

Each occurrence is judged on its own, as in lab_software_names(): a term inside a quoted longer name such as 'MATLAB Runtime' or 'AWS Python SDK' is quoted, and so is one in a web address, a <doi:...> or a double-quoted book title.

Source

Writing R Extensions, under "The DESCRIPTION file", asks for single quotes around other software; checktor applies the same to programming-language and markup names. See vignette("check-sources", package = "checktor") for how every check maps to its source.

Examples

pkg <- example_diagnose_scenario("description_examples/language_names_bad.txt",
                                 show_content = FALSE)
lab_language_names(pkg, verbose = FALSE)$issues
#> [1] "Description: Python should be in single quotes"
#> [2] "Description: Julia should be in single quotes" 
unlink(pkg, recursive = TRUE)