[Rd] FW: sas.get error

[Warnes, Gregory R]

A couple of months ago, I asked Frank Harrell (fharrell@virginia.edu), the
author of the Hmisc S-Plus library, about the reason for his "No porting to
R" requirement.  I may have previously posted his reply, but I don't see it
in the archives, so I'll send it again.

This is a edited version of our email conversation:

 Gregory R. Warnes:  

	The license to the Hmisc library explicitly prohibits modifying the
      code to work with "R".  Why have you made this restriction?
 
 Frank E. Harrell, Jr.:  

     Some time ago an R user took it on himself to start converting my
     libraries to R without at least sending me an E-mail.  He started
     the conversion at a time just when I was making a good deal of
     error corrections and extensions to one of the libraries, so that
     the R version would be instantly out of date and buggy.  I thought
     this was strange and wanted to prevent such problems in the future.
 
     In the meantime I have been looking at R a good deal to see what
     would be involved in conversion.  I have found many more
     inconsistencies between R and S than I originally thought.  Some of
     these inconsistencies are because of improvements, some make the
     language worse (e.g., omission of single precision objects in R, the 
     inability to attach directories).  I estimate it will take me about 200

     hours of work to convert, even if I didn't mind losing single precision

     and Trellis graphics in R.  I'm not ruling out a conversion in the
future 
     but it will take some resources.

     If resources become available in the future I would be interested in 
     starting a CVS server to work will a good R programmer in this
endeavor.  
     Above all I do not want two code bases; version control is needed with
a 
     single code base.

-Greg
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