Aha. Thank you. This explains the mystery a year ago when graduate
students in my nonparametric course were simulating the power of
various tests under different alternatives. On the department's
SPARC 10 with recently installed S-Plus 5.1, they were waiting
"minutes" for output even without other users. On my identically
equipped SPARC 10 with S-plus 3.2 the time was of the order
"seconds". I have no benchmarks just the memory of astonishment.
>
>Date: 23 Feb 2000 00:59:46 GMT
>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal)
>Subject: Re: statistical computing
>
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>Frank E Harrell Jr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > S-Plus is a powerful object-oriented language based on the S
> > language (created at the same place that created the C language -
> > ATT Bell Labs - C is for "computer" S for "statistics").
>
>Usually, I find this sort of cheerleading just a bit annoying, but
>when given in response to a student's request for information about
>what to learn, it gets downright misleading.
>
>The truth: S-Plus is not particularly powerful, and it's not
>particularly well designed. Its implementation by the people at AT&T
>Bell labs is downright incompetent. Of course, it has lots of support
>for statistical methods, making it useful for statisticians to know,
>but it's a shame that this has had the effect of locking academic
>statisticians into this indifferently-designed and badly-implemented
>language, which is completely unusable some purposes, such as Markov
>chain Monte Carlo computations. The free "R" look-alike for S may fix
>at least the badly-implemented part of this dilema.
>
>Below is a posting I recently made to sci.stat.math, remarking on the
>amazingly *worse* performance of the latest release of S-Plus - which
>is up to SEVENTEEN times slower than the previous release
>
>This new release is so ridiculously bad that I wonder whether there's
>something wrong with just the version for SGI machines. I'd be
>interested to find out what the results are on other machines. Anyone
>else with both the old and the new S-Plus want to try?
...........................................................................
@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Fred M. Hoppe, Ph.D.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Professor, Mathematics and Statistics
@/ __ __ \@ McMaster University
@| (q) (p) |@ 1280 Main St. West
{ / \ } Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4K1, Canada
| ~~~~~ | Phone: (905) 525-9140 Ext. 24688
| \_____/ | Fax: (905) 522-0935
\ / E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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