[R] question about the "Y of R" article in the latest R news

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Mark Kimpel <mwkimpel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I found the article the "Y of R" in the latest R news to be very
> interesting. It is certainly challenging me to learn more about how R works
> "under the hood" as the author states. What is less clear to me is whether
> this approach is primarily for teaching purposes or has a real world
> application. What is meant by "fragility of reliance on the function
> name defined as a global variable" as a downside to the classical recursive
> formulation of function "s"? How can that impact the average R programmer?

The entire sentence is:
"We can avoid the fragility of reliance on the function
name defined as a global variable, by invoking
the function through Recall instead of using selfreference."
so he is referring to the fact that if one self-references the function by name
then renaming the function causes it to no longer work.  That is there
is fragile dependence on the function name.  He points out that the R
function, Recall, can be used to avoid that.