[R] RE: [Rd] too many arguments in foreign function call

[Duncan Murdoch]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 19:23:52 +0100 (GMT Daylight Time), you wrote in
message <Pine.WNT.4.31.0107161916001.1056-100000 at tern.stats>:

>The argument is that new code should probably be using .Call (if S
>compatibility is relevant) or .External rather than .C, at least provided
>that a C wrapper is feasible.  Those interfaces seem very much under-used.
>(Including by me, for S3-compatibility reasons.)

The difficulty with using .External is that it only works with C, not
with other languages, because you need the R header definitions.  I
think there is a fairly large group of programmers like myself who
aren't very comfortable programming in C.  The .C interface isn't tied
to the R header files the way .External is, so it's not too hard to
call other languages with it.  I use it with Delphi and Kylix, for
instance.

It's a nice quirk that ".C" is the interface to use for general
external code, and ".External" for C code.

Duncan Murdoch
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