Hello all,

I am trying to implement a simple Genetic Algorithm. I am doing this
in R since I want access to the statistical functions (eg lm) it
provides.

I'm not new to programming, or GAs, but I am totally new to R (the
package and the language), and I am hoping someone could help with
these questions:

1. I am going to use a binary representation, it seems that vectors of
   Factors would be what I should use? I would specify values of
   TRUE/FALSE instead? Or is there a better choice for manipulating
   binary strings? Does this seem like a legitimate way to create a
   random one: sample(0:1, vec_size, replace=T)

2. Am I correct in assuming that R is interpreted (and hence is going to
   be noticeably slower than compiled languages)?

3. Is there some sort of debugging facility? 

4. Does anyone know how to do an effective search for R in google (or
   other search engines). The fact that this is a single letters seems
   to have most applications ignore this input. This might help me in
   finding answers to some other basic questions I have (such as is
   there an equivalent function to "printf" in R? "cat" and "print"
   are not quite working right for me -- but I need to dig deeper into
   the documentation)

I am not sure if this belongs into the help or development group, so
I'm giving this a try. If this is the wrong group to post in, please
let me know and I'll repost.

There will probably be more elementary questions (I am reading the
various manuals too .. but if anyone has some other favorite sites
they want to recommend please do so)

Thanks,
Esmail

ps: I there a USENET group dedicated to R?

pps: I am also exploring ways of calling R functions from Java, if
     anyone has any comments regarding that please share.
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