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

Patrick Burns pburns at pburns.seanet.com
Mon Nov 5 19:47:11 CET 2012


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:
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Iurie Malai <iurie.malai at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In the "Introduction and preliminaries" the "An Introduction to R" manual
>> says about R: "... Among other things it has ... a well developed, simple
>> and effective programming language (Called 'S') ... ". Now I'm a little
>> confused. This means that language S is a component part of R? And S is not
>> free? But R is free? Or the mentioned S is only "a free implementation" of
>> the "true S"? Can anybody explain this? I want to know.
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>
> '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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>

-- 
Patrick Burns
pburns at pburns.seanet.com
twitter: @portfolioprobe
http://www.portfolioprobe.com/blog
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of 'Some hints for the R beginner'
and 'The R Inferno')




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