[R] Lisp-like primitives in R

[Roland Rau]

François Pinard wrote:
> I wonder what happened, for R to hide the underlying Scheme so fully, at 
> least at the level of the surface language (despite there are hints).  

As far as I understood, the original version of Ihaka/Gentleman was 
written in Scheme. But even if you look at the source version of R 0.49 
(the oldest I can find), the source files are written in C. In addition, 
in their article published in "Journal of Computational and Graphical 
Statistics" in 1996, Ihaka and Gentleman write on page 307: "To further 
foster portability, we chose to write R in ANSI C...."

Hope this clarifies the situation a bit. If we are lucky and one of the 
original authors reads this thread they might explain the situation 
further and better (and probably correct me).

Best,
Roland