[R] environments and lexical scoping (conceptual issues)

Prof Brian D Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Fri May 19 07:44:39 CEST 2000


On Thu, 18 May 2000, Faheem Mitha wrote:

> Dear R people,
> 
> I have been reading about R in V&R's `S programming', specifically Section
> 3.4, entitled `Databases, frames, and environments'.

> The discussion in `S Programming' is by far the most detailed of these
> important concepts that I have seen, but it would be even more useful if
> it were made more wordy and more (simple) examples were given, so as to
> make misunderstandings more difficult. I have read the preceding passage a
> number of times, but as you can see its meaning is still not fully clear
> to me, and I have not been able to find any documentation that sheds
> further light on the concepts discussed here.

Well, page 55 does say it is hard work, and there are extensive examples
in that chapter and in chapter 7.  Thomas Lumley and Peter Dalgaard
have I hope shed some further light for you.

One problem with writing about R is that it changes, and it changed a lot
while that section was being written (including in notation and 
in part because of difficulties we found in describing it).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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