[R] Lisp-like primitives in R

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 06/09/2007 7:36 PM, Roland Rau wrote:
> François Pinard wrote:
>> I wonder what happened, for R to hide the underlying Scheme so fully, at 
>> least at the level of the surface language (despite there are hints).  
> 
> As far as I understood, the original version of Ihaka/Gentleman was 
> written in Scheme. But even if you look at the source version of R 0.49 
> (the oldest I can find), the source files are written in C. In addition, 
> in their article published in "Journal of Computational and Graphical 
> Statistics" in 1996, Ihaka and Gentleman write on page 307: "To further 
> foster portability, we chose to write R in ANSI C...."
> 
> Hope this clarifies the situation a bit. If we are lucky and one of the 
> original authors reads this thread they might explain the situation 
> further and better (and probably correct me).

You could also look at Ross Ihaka's paper that is online here:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/html/interface98-paper/paper.html

R was written in C, with the intention that it be Scheme-like.

Duncan Murdoch