[Rd] Should CRAN accept packages with non-R code that transcompiles into R code?

[jan Vitek]

As long as the semantic models are close, then such a translation is
possible and not even very difficult. Syntactic sugar is cheap. 
The challenge that you will run into is that there is a temptation
to change the semantics when designing a new language. R has many
warts that, if one were to start today, one could imagine removing.
But any change to semantics is really hard to implement by 
source to source translation. My guess is that before you know it
you will have a very different language that runs extremely slowly.




Jan Vitek, Professor 
Computer Science, 
Northeastern University

> On Mar 5, 2019, at 3:34 PM, Abs Spurdle <spurdle.a using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 12:49 PM jan Vitek <vitekj using icloud.com> wrote:
> 
>> Everything is possible. One can compile C++ into JavaScript.
>> 
>> But why?
>> 
>> 
> I would like to support Java style syntax for class definitions.
> (Then it could transcompile into either S3 or S4).
> 
> And possibly change some other things while I'm at it.
> Maybe, integers (rather than numerics) as defaults, and * for standard
> matrix multiplication (and ** for R style vectorized multiplication).
> 
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