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

13 messages · R. Michael Weylandt, Iurie Malai, Patrick Burns +7 more

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On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Iurie Malai <iurie.malai at gmail.com> wrote:
'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
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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:

  
    
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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
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On 06/11/12 09:40, Iurie Malai wrote:
Are others getting as sick of this silly, pedantic and completely
irrelevant pseudo-scholasticism as I am?

     cheers,

         Rolf Turner
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On 05-11-2012, at 22:04, Rolf Turner wrote:

            
Yes.
Let's just stop it.

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

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

Michael
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Logic is irrelevant. You must simply embrace the FoRce.

----------------------------------------------
Obi Wan David L Carlson
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-4352
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On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 2:34 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
R has lots of similarities but it isn't "just" extended S!!! it has
many better features grammatically.
R packaging to low level language integration being small set of
differences. I recommend you to
read the R book by the inventor of S, John Chambers, (ACM award
recipient) to understand
the fundamental differences:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Software-Data-Analysis-Prt
ogramming-Statistics/dp/0387759352

S/S+ is a commercial product. R community and academics provides much
larger and high
quality/reliable open source alternative to this and yet let anyone
use it for free, as in freedom,
even if you are nasty person, you are allowed to practice this.
What did you contribute to world accept making toxic comments on the list of
one of the largest open source academic software on the planet?

No cookies for you, go home.