R-beta: Some General Questions

[Douglas Bates]

I'll take a stab at answering a couple of your questions.

"MIKE FLEMING"<mike_fleming_at_nass-fx at nass.usda.gov> writes:

>      3. Shell commands like !pwd do not work on my installation of R like   
>         they do for me in Splus. Does R support the use of shell commands?

In R you have to fall back on the more basic function called
"system".  If I want to find out the current working directory I would
use
 R> system("pwd")
 /home/bates/courses/st849

>      4. Is there a matrix library for R like the one used for Splus? Is     
>         such a library needed by R?

Not presently.  Since the LAPACK code is freely available it would be
possible to create such a library.  If a library were being created I
would advocate going directly to a C++ implementation of the linear
algebra code, such as lapack++ or TNT (see http://math.nist.gov/tnt/)
since R can interface with C++ code.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=