R as programming language: references?

"Jan T. Kim" <jtk at cmp.uea.ac.uk> writes:

I don't know what Federico Calboli has in mind, but as for myself, upon
starting with R, I've been looking for an R language reference in the
style of the Python reference (http://docs.python.org/ref/ref.html).
The specification of the grammar and the associated semantics of a
language gives me the kind of in-depth conceptual understanding that I
like to have, and I find this more difficult to accrue for R than for
other languages. For example, I'm still not certain whether I'm able to
correctly predict how many copies of an object are created during the
execution of some code, and consequently, I'm not really confident that
my code is reasonably optimal.

I'd appreciate pointers to any (more or less hidden) gems I may have
overlooked, of course.

The R language definition manual is pretty much of that variety. It
has the parser specification at the end rather than at the beginning,
but otherwise it is quite similar in structure to the Python one.

The document has developed at glacial speed for several years. It
probably could do with some restructuring and rewriting (by whom?),
but you also have to be aware that some aspects of R, notably
computing on the language, creates interdependences in the
specification that are not present in other languages. I.e., the
parsing section needs to talk about parse trees and their
representation as R objects, hence it is useful to have discussed the
structure of an R object first.

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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