A general question: Is language S a component part of R?
Almost all syntactically correct S code works in R and S+ the same as it did in S (the last version of which came out c. 1999), modulo bug fixes. Off the top of my head, I'd say the only things that were eliminated were the use of the underscore as the assignment operator and the elimination of the keywords 'T' and 'F'. R extends the language, e.g., to do lexical scoping, and S+ has stayed truer to S. Hence I would say that the language interpreted by R is almost a superset of the S language as it existed in 1999. (I'm speaking of the language itself, not the packages build using the language.) Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com
-----Original Message----- From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Iurie Malai Sent: Monday, November 05, 2012 11:38 AM To: Patrick Burns Cc: r-help at r-project.org Subject: Re: [R] A general question: Is language S a component part of R? After reading the 'Inferno-ish R' the first thing that comes to mind is that R is very much like S, but it's still different (R is not S), so it can't contain the S as a programming language, as the manual says. Or I'm wrong? 2012/11/5 Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com>
There is a bit of history in: http://www.portfolioprobe.com/**2012/05/31/inferno-ish-
Pat On 05/11/2012 17:09, R. Michael Weylandt wrote:
On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Iurie Malai <iurie.malai at gmail.com> wrote:
In the "Introduction and preliminaries" the "An Introduction to R" manual says about R: "... Among other things it has ... a well developed, simple and effective programming language (Called 'S') ... ". Now I'm a little confused. This means that language S is a component part of R? And S is not free? But R is free? Or the mentioned S is only "a free implementation" of the "true S"? Can anybody explain this? I want to know. Thank you!
'S' is a language, invented at Bell Labs
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**S_(programming_language)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wik i/S_(programming_language)>)
which has two major implementations. S-Plus, which is a commercial product, and R, which you know well. R was originally quite like S/S-Plus, but it's changed over time and diverged aways and now I believe the R README says R is 'not unlike' S. Consider, e.g., Python, which is a language (specified in documentation) with multiple implementations: CPython, PyPy, Jython, IronPython, etc. If R and S-Plus had identical functionality they would be different concrete realizations of the abstract 'S' language, but they're more than slightly different in practice. Not sure if that helps at all.... Michael
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______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.