[R] New Year Wish List

[Baz]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> Congrats to all those who have contributed to R over the
> past year.  As with last year, for New Year I would like to
> list the top 10 features I would like to see in R.   The first 
> three are the most important.

  My wish for R is some sort of timestamping on objects, so I know when 
they were created or modified.

  This would then enable the creation of a 'make'-like system in R, 
where the 'target' is some output of an analysis (eg the fit of a linear 
model) and the dependencies are the input data.

  For a complex problem, you might have a target that depends on many 
other things, and you dont want to have to redo expensive operations (eg 
MCMC runs, large simulations) if nothing that they depend on has 
changed. The grand idea is to have a single specification of the problem 
(which would be an R object of class 'make' perhaps) and then you can 
just do make(foo) to do all the required code to get the result.

  This might be a very useful method for transferring analyses between 
people.

  I did have a hack at putting timestamps on R objects by mucking with 
the C code that created new objects, and adding an 
attribute('timestamp'). It superficially worked, but R started to fall 
to pieces since objects stopped being identical to copies of themselves. 
Oops. it clearly needs attaching at a lower level, but I'm not sure 
where or how much of a performance hit it might be.

  End of wishlist.

Baz