On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Michael Friendly <frien...@yorku.ca> wrote: > I'm giving a talk about some aspects of language and conceptual tools for > thinking about how > to solve problems in several programming languages for statistical computing > and graphics. I'm particularly > interested in language features that relate to: > > o expressive power: ease of translating what you want to do into the results > you want > o elegance: how well does the code provide a simple human-readable > description of what is done? > o extensibility: ease of generalizing a method to wider scope > o learnability: your learning curve (rate, asymptote) > > For R, some things to cite are (a) data and function objects, (b) > object-oriented methods (S3 & S4); (c) function mapping over data with > *apply methods and plyr. > > What other language features of R should be on this list? I would welcome > suggestions (and brief illustrative examples).
* missing values * subsetting * lexical scope and closures (goes along with first class functions) * built-in documentation * CRAN (not exactly a language feature, but important part of ecosystem) * thoughtful interactive features - e.g. a <- 10 doesn't print 10. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
