[R] Lisp-like primitives in R

[François Pinard]

[Roland Rau]
>[François Pinard]

>>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).  

>"To further foster portability, we chose to write R in ANSI C...."

Yes, of course.  Scheme is also (often) implemented in C.  I meant that 
R might have implemented a Scheme engine (or part of a Scheme engine, 
extended with appropriate data types) with a surface language (nearly 
the S language) which is purposely not Scheme, but could have been.

If the gap is not extreme, one could dare dreaming that the Scheme 
engine in R be "completed", and Scheme offered as an alternate extension 
language.  If you allow me to continue dreaming awake -- "they" told me 
"they" will let me free as long as I do not get dangerous! :-) -- part 
of the interest lies in the fact there are excellent Scheme compilers.  
If we could only find or devise some kind of marriage between a mature 
Scheme and R, so to speed up the non-vectorisable parts of R scripts...

>If we are lucky and one of the original authors reads this thread they 
>might explain the situation further and better [...].

In r-devel, maybe!  We would be lucky if the authors really had time to 
read r-help. :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca