[Rd] C vs. C++ as learning and development tool for R

[Dominick Samperi]

Kimpel, Mark William wrote:
> I have 3 years of experience with R and have an interest in becoming a
> better programmer so that I might someday be able to contribute
> packages. Other than R, my only experience was taking Lisp from Daniel
> Friedman in the 1970's. I would like to learn either C or C++ for
> several reasons:
>
> To gain a better concept of object oriented programming so that I can
> begin to use S4 methods in R.
>
> To perhaps speed up some things I do repeatedly in R
>
> To be able to contribute a package someday.
>   
If you decide to use C++ with R you should check out the documentation
that comes with the package RcppTemplate, and the sample code that
comes with that package. In my experience C++ (or C or FORTRAN) is
needed for many compute intensive tasks, and the R framework provides
a nice front-end with its extensive collection of visualization and
statistical analysis tools.

Disclaimer: I have no experience with S4.

ds