[Rd] Re: Packages and Libraries (was: Re: lme4 "package" etc

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005, Jeff Gentry wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Achim Zeileis wrote:
>> A *library* is a directory in which you can find R *packages* (just as
>> in real life you can find books in a library) and with
>>   library("foo", lib.loc = "/path/to/bar")
>> you want to get the package (book) "foo" from the library "bar" located
>> at "/path/to/bar".
>
> Out of pure curiosity, could anyone tell me the historical reason that
> library() is used here?  Does it tie in to the S ancestry of R?

It's been the way S does it since ca 1987 (when the Blue Book version of S 
first made S extensible via functions as today).  See the 1988 Blue Book 
p.58.  The only difference (as I have already noted) is that the S library 
has `sections' not `packages'.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595