open source and R

If I do not know C or FORTRAN, how can I fully understand the package or
possibly improve it?

Robert.

Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> wrote:
On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Robert wrote:

Roger Bivand wrote: 
On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Robert wrote:

It uses FORTRAN code and not in pure R.

The same applies to deldir - it also includes Fortran. So the answer seems 
to be no, there is no voronoi function only written in R.

Robert wrote:

I am curious about one thing: since the reason for using r is r is a
easy-to-learn language and it is good for getting more people involved.
Why most of the packages written in r use other languages such as
FORTRAN's code? I understand some functions have already been written in
other language or it is faster to be implemented in other language. But
my understanding is if the user does not know that language (for
example, FORTRAN), the package is still a black box to him because he
can not improve the package and can not be involved in the development. 
When I searched the packages of R, I saw many packages with duplicated
or similar functions. the main difference among them are the different
functions implemented using other languages, which are always a black
box to the users. So it is very hard for users to believe the package
will run something they need, let alone getting involved in the
development. My comments are not to disregard these efforts. But it is
good to see the packages written in pure R.

Please indent your replies, they are very difficult to read sensibly.

Although surprisingly much of R is written in R, quite a lot is written in
Fortran and C. One very good reason, apart from efficiency, is code re-use
- BLAS and LAPACK among many others are excellent implementations of what
we need for numerical linear algebra. R is very typical of good scientific
software, it tries to avoid re-implementing functions that are used by the
community, are well-supported by the community, and work. Packages by and
large do the same - if existing software does the required job, package
authors attempt to port that software to R, providing interfaces to
underlying C or Fortran libraries. 

It's about standing on the shoulders of giants.