[R] Formal definitions of R-language.

[Douglas Trainor]

Uwe Ligges wrote:

> M.Kondrin wrote:
>
>> Hello!
>> Some CS-guys (the type who knows what Church formalism is) keep 
>> asking me questions about formal definitions of R-language that I can 
>> not answer (or even understand). Is there some freely available 
>> papers which I can throw at them where it would be explained is R 
>> functional/OOP/procedural language, does it use weak/strong, 
>> dynamic/static typization, does it use lazy or ...(do not know what) 
>> evaluation, what sort of garbage collector it uses?
>> Thanks.
>
>
> R ships with a draft version of the manual "R Language Definition".
> Another source is Venables & Ripley (2000): S Programming, Springer. 


Tell the "CS-guys" to grab the source code and chew on the LALR 
context-free grammar stuff in the file "gram.y" as in:

    R-1.7.1/src/main/gram.y

"R Language Definition" lives at:

    http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-lang.pdf