R-beta: 'all.names' function -- failing as.list( _function_ )

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Ross Ihaka <ihaka at stat.auckland.ac.nz> writes:

> Many of the incompatibilities result from us not being familiar with
> some of the inner mysteries of S - these are generally pretty easy to
> fix.  Some incompatibilities however result from the fact that R
> started life as a kind of Lisp interpreter.  These can be quite a bit
> harder to fix.

Also (this is an absolutely uninformative and uninformed remark, I
know) I hope you/we will think these matters over very carefully,
before possibly throwing a baby out with the bathing water. Some of
the mysteries of S are probably better categorized as design bugs, and
in contrast Lisp-dialects have been subjected to a long history of
analysis by computer scientists in all the critical issues of memory
handling, scoping rules, optimizability, compilability, etc.

A little divergence between the two languages is not really critical,
we already have it in the scoping rules, and as long as the internal
logic is OK, I don't think that the porting issues are all that bad.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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