I (sort of) already know the answer to this question. But I figured it is one that gets asked so frequently on the R Users list, that there should be one solid good answer.
This does come up on the mailing list fairly regularly, see for example this recent thread on r-help. The consensus answer usually is the one shown above: that given that the language has no direct support, you have to either
if (FALSE)
constructs suggested earlier but note that it still requires complete parsing and must hence be syntactically correct