[Rd] Ice cream flavor metaphor in statistical computing

[Peter Dalgaard]

"Marc Schwartz (via MN)" <mschwartz at mn.rr.com> writes:

> On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 16:05 -0500, Jeffrey Horner wrote:
> > Forgive me, but since it's Friday and I've been thinking about command 
> > line options lately, I thought I'd find out who came up with the name of 
> > the --vanilla argument for R. From the svn log:
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > r2509 | maechler | 1998-10-10 10:52:53 -0500 (Sat, 10 Oct 1998) | 2 lines
> > Changed paths:
> >     M /trunk/src/unix/system.c
> > 
> > new --vanilla
> > 
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > Are there any interesting anecdotes about this... Did Martin Maechler 
> > name it? Certainly --plain could have been used instead...
> > 
> > Jeff
> 
> Hey Jeff,
> 
> I suppose that we should be glad that Martin was not eating Ben and
> Jerry's at the time or the command line might be:
> 
>   R --NewYorkSuperFudgeChunk®
> 
> ;-)
> 
> This reference might be of help:
> 
>   http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=plain-vanilla

It is unclear from my records of R-core mails at the time what the
decision process, if any, might have been, but terms like "vanilla S"
(AT&T S as opposed to S-PLUS) were being bandied about. The option
--vanilla was preceded by constructions like

../bin/R --no-init-file --no-save --no-restore < simple-true.R > simple-true.Rout

which was indeed a bit long-winded.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
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