[R] Several R vs S-Plus issues

[Philippe Grosjean]

I understand you feel shoked when you spend hours and hours compiling a
message with all bugs and differences you found between R and Splus. But,
please, understand that what you call the "development team" is just a group
of volunteers. This is *very* different than the "development team" of Splus
whose job is to develop the software for others, called "users". With GPL
software, like R, there is no clear limit between the "development team" and
the "users". When "users" reach you level of understanding of the software,
they are expected to become somehow part of the "development team". It means
that you should preferrably propose patches, that is, corrections for bugs
you found. If you cannot, then there are standard methods for submitting
bugs to the _fuzzy_ developers community. It is because everybody can take
part of the development that these methods (that you find too rigid) are
like that.

A last point. R is not a clone of Splus... It is just "not unlike Splus".
Thus, any difference is not necessarily a bug. But, since you did already a
good job there, why not to start making a pdf document that underlines all
differences between Splus and R? This document would be intended for
developers that translate Splus code to R code and vice versa. This sounds
great to me, because I am developing code for both Splus and R, and I
sometimes lose hours figuring out why my code works in R and not in Splus,
or the contrary.
Best regards,

Philippe Grosjean


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 ) ) ) ) )	                  	 __
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-----Message d'origine-----
De : owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch]De la part de David Brahm
Envoyé : mercredi 3 octobre 2001 18:57
À : p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk
Cc : r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Objet : Re: [R] Several R vs S-Plus issues


Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> wrote:
> Sorry if I sound annoyed, but I am....

Grossly unfair, Peter!  And since you chose to vent your annoyance publicly,
I am responding publicly.  I spent several hours trying to build a coherent,
single-page summary of my observations over several weeks, and my reward is
a
scolding for sending my email to the address given in the FAQ???  Jeez!
Just
delete it if it offends so much!

> PLEASE do not post several bugs in one report ...
> PLEASE discern between actual bugs and points for discussion...

Not mentioned in the FAQ (section 9.2), nor anywhere else on CRAN that I can
find.  It sounds like r-bugs is some kind of automated system that cannot
handle non-standard formatting, is that it?  I assumed it was just read by a
human (the "bugs guy"), parsed, and handed out appropriately, sorry.

> PLEASE do not mail to multiple addresses. All bug reports are echoed
> to the r-devel list and should be discussed there.

Then I don't understand how to communicate with the "development team",
besides
just posting to the general discussion list.  Is every posting there really
read and handled by the right people?  I guess I fundamentally don't
understand
your communication model, e.g. how my comment about subsetting (which isn't
strictly a "bug") gets to the guy who actually writes "[".

> Sorry if I sound annoyed, but I am....

Likewise.  R-help sure is filled with a lot of negativity.

		       -- David Brahm (a215020 at agate.fmr.com)
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