R strings, null-terminated or size delimited?

Duncan Murdoch a ?crit :

I believe I should. I'd like the OCaml / R binding to be closely knit 
to R internals. One reason would be for speed, the other being that 
I'd like to make use of camlp4 to write syntax extensions to mix OCaml 
and R syntax. It's therefore important for me not to rely on the R 
interpreter to be active when building R values. Or when marshaling R 
values via OCaml. There are numerous other issues aside this one.

You are probably not going to be able to do that.  Take your example of 
the promise below:  to evaluate a promise, you need to evaluate the 
expression attached to it in the R interpreter.  (This is discussed in 
the R Language Definition.)

You can put probably put together simple R objects like integer arrays 
without having R running, but anything substantial isn't going to be 
feasible.

Duncan Murdoch

That's precisely the issue. I want to map a functional language to a 
functional language. And keep the same evaluation semantics. I do not 
(yet?) see why it should not be feasible.

If this is done properly, OCaml could then compile R code natively. That 
would be really nice. There would be other advantages in integrating the 
two languages cleanly.

So, taking the example of promises, I need to map it to its OCaml 
semantic equivalent, which seems to be a Lazy.t structure. That doesn't 
seem (yet) unfeasible.

Thank you for your pointer to the R Language Definition. Starting by R 
Internals was perhaps a bit brutal.

All the best,