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history of objects() and ls()

3 messages · Ben Bolker, Peter Dalgaard, William Dunlap

#
I found out today (maybe I had known sometime before??) that objects()
is a synonym for ls().  I'm curious about the history, which seems to go
at least back to the beginning of R.  It's been thus since SVN revision
2 (Sep 1997) ...

svn cat https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/base/R/attach at 2 |
grep objects

  I had a quick look at the Becker & Chambers brown book (1984) and
Becker and Wilks blue book (1988) on Google books and could find ls but
not objects() ... ?

  Anyone happen to know?

 cheers
   Ben Bolker
#
As far as I remember, this comes from S-PLUS, introduced around v.3 (white book?) or maybe v.4, and due to a desire to cut some Unix ties as MS-DOS was taking over the world. However, it was long ago, in a different world, and besides, S-PLUS is dead (mostly).

- Peter

  
    
#
S-PLUS took it from S, sometime in the early 1990's.  The "White Book"
("Statistical Models in S", Chambers and Hastie, eds.,1992), uses objects()
on p.88..

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 4:47 PM Peter Dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote: