[R] Formal definitions of R-language.

[M.Kondrin]

Douglas Trainor wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
Thanks for your answers!
I have already read "R Language Definition" but it is rather hmmm... 
evasive (?). For example:

  R belongs to a class of programming languages in which subroutines
have the ability to modify or construct other subroutines and evaluate
the result as an integral part of the language itself.  This is similar
to Lisp and Scheme and other languages of the "functional programming"
variety, but in contrast to FORTRAN and the ALGOL family.

Being similar to other functional programming language does not mean 
being the one itself, or does it? About typing it (not this passage I 
mean but "RLD" in a whole) said nothing.
This thing about LALR is very good. I will try it on them.