A general question: Is language S a component part of R?

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-
project.org] On Behalf Of R. Michael Weylandt
<michael.weylandt at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2012 3:48 PM
To: Iurie Malai
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] A general question: Is language S a component part of
R?



On Nov 5, 2012, at 6:37 PM, Iurie Malai <iurie.malai at gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks all!

At least for me, the manual text has a contradiction. If R is much

like S,

in other words it is a "diverged" S, as Michael says, it can't

include

itself as a component part.

I'd think something like C/C++ -- the later includes the former ...
mostly ... except where it doesn't.

Michael

Regards,
Iurie


2012/11/5 R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt at gmail.com>

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

--
Iurie Malai

+(373) 79288710 - Moldcell
+(373) 67459710 - Unite

   [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

guide.html