[Rd] factorial() not here (PR#1194)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 5 Dec 2001, A.J. Rossini wrote:

> >>>>> "m" == maechler  <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:
>
> >>>>> "rmh" == rmh  <rmh@surfer.sbm.temple.edu> writes:
>
>     m> well, and where's the bug ?  There are many more functions in
>     m> S+ which are not in R.  factorial() is not a blue book or white
>     m> book function {of course!}; hence no direct reason to have it
>     m> in R.  Reversely, should we start sending bug reports to S-news
>     m> or Insightful for R functions not existing in S+ ?
>
> Combine this with Brian's comment about Greg's concat masking an S
> function, and this is amusing.
>
> R-core can't have it both ways, emulating S when it pleases, and
> complaining when not!  (at least Greg implemented it for future, so
> that we don't get the mandatory statement about volunteer projects!).

Eh?  I don't find it amusing at all.
What I personally want to avoid is functions of the same name with
very different functionality in the two systems.  It makes porting code
between them too error-prone. R-core has been adding S-compatibility a lot
recently, and Insightful are planning to add some R-compatibility, all of
which I see as positive.

*However*, Martin was complaining that this was sent in as a bug report.
I think that is fair comment: it was not marked as a feature request.  I
do think it would be worth adding, but as 1.4.0 is in feature freeze, not
right now.

General comment: please mark feature requests as `for the wishlist' or
something similar when sending to R-bugs.

Brian

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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