On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Roger Bivand wrote: > On Sun, 13 Nov 2005, Robert wrote: > >> If I do not know C or FORTRAN, how can I fully understand the package >> or possibly improve it? > > By learning enough to see whether that makes a difference for your > purposes. Life is hard, but that's what makes life interesting ...
None of us "fully understands" what we are doing with computer software. If you understand R code, that's great, but then there is the R interpreter -- do you understand how it works? That interpreter was written in another language that was then compiled by a compiler which was written by someone else for some other purpose -- do you understand the compiler? Then it all gets processed by some very complex hardware that practically none of us *fully* understands. We have to accept that we can't have a complete grasp of what R is doing, but we can still read the R docs and test R in many ways. When functions are written in R, they may be easier for you to read, but they may run much slower than code written in C, C++ or FORTRAN. I don't think it is wise to forgo the speed improvement so that people who don't know FORTRAN can enjoy contributing to R development. The contribution of FORTRAN libraries R functionality and efficiency is probably much greater than the contributions would be from any group of people who could code in R but could't code in C or FORTRAN. That said, I appreciate the sentiment and I think we should prefer straight R code for many functions, but some things just run too slowly when written that way. Mike ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html