On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Jeff Gentry wrote:
On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Achim Zeileis wrote:A *library* is a directory in which you can find R *packages* (just as in real life you can find books in a library) and with library("foo", lib.loc = "/path/to/bar") you want to get the package (book) "foo" from the library "bar" located at "/path/to/bar".
Out of pure curiosity, could anyone tell me the historical reason that library() is used here? Does it tie in to the S ancestry of R?
It's been the way S does it since ca 1987 (when the Blue Book version of S first made S extensible via functions as today). See the 1988 Blue Book p.58. The only difference (as I have already noted) is that the S library has `sections' not `packages'.
-- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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