A general question: Is language S a component part of R?
There is a bit of history in: http://www.portfolioprobe.com/2012/05/31/inferno-ish-r/ 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)) 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
______________________________________________ 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.
Patrick Burns pburns at pburns.seanet.com twitter: @portfolioprobe http://www.portfolioprobe.com/blog http://www.burns-stat.com (home of 'Some hints for the R beginner' and 'The R Inferno')