[Rd] Samples of external code with various compilers?

[Mark.Bravington@csiro.au]

>
#> what call mode to use for procedures (i.e. stack order and removal of
#> parameters; I had always used STDCALL with S and R, and then 
#found I was
#> getting bugs with R 1.6.1. So in desperation I eventually 
#changed this at
#> random to C-CALL, and things started working again in R-- 
#and continued to
#> work in S. To my continued puzzlement, actually.)
#
#Well, that *is* documented.  For R in readme.packages under 
#`Using other
#compilers and languages' which is quite a short section.  So if people
#don't read what is already there, is there any point in expanding it?

Well, here are some reasons:

documentation is distributed in quite a few different places and it is not
always easy to find the right bit. Duncan Murdoch's email said that he'd
also forgotten about readme.packages;

the location of documentation can change between R versions;

In this specific case, not all DLLs are loaded as part of packages, so
readme.packages might not occur to everyone. As Duncan said, it might be
good to refer to that file via dyn.load documentation.

BTW I still use Splus 2000 not S6, and I don't recall finding this in the
documentation for earlier version of S. 

Anyway, the STDCALL stuff was just an example of something that confused me
for a while. Different things will confuse different people. At any rate,
it's not a crime to duplicate the same pieces of information in different
places in the documentation, if it helps the user.

cheers
Mark

#
#It's also documented for S-PLUS (if that is what you mean by `S': it
#reflects a lot of work by Insightful on top of Lucent S4).

Duplicating documentatino

#-- 
#Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
#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 272860 (secr)
#Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
#