[Roland Rau] >[François Pinard] >>I wonder what happened, for R to hide the underlying Scheme so fully, >>at least at the level of the surface language (despite there are >>hints).
>"To further foster portability, we chose to write R in ANSI C...." Yes, of course. Scheme is also (often) implemented in C. I meant that R might have implemented a Scheme engine (or part of a Scheme engine, extended with appropriate data types) with a surface language (nearly the S language) which is purposely not Scheme, but could have been. If the gap is not extreme, one could dare dreaming that the Scheme engine in R be "completed", and Scheme offered as an alternate extension language. If you allow me to continue dreaming awake -- "they" told me "they" will let me free as long as I do not get dangerous! :-) -- part of the interest lies in the fact there are excellent Scheme compilers. If we could only find or devise some kind of marriage between a mature Scheme and R, so to speed up the non-vectorisable parts of R scripts... >If we are lucky and one of the original authors reads this thread they >might explain the situation further and better [...]. In r-devel, maybe! We would be lucky if the authors really had time to read r-help. :-) -- François Pinard http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.