Thanks all!

At least for me, the manual text has a contradiction. If R is much like S,
in other words it is a "diverged" S, as Michael says, it can't include
itself as a component part.

Regards,
Iurie


2012/11/5 R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt@gmail.com>

> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Iurie Malai <iurie.malai@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In the "Introduction and preliminaries" the "An Introduction to R" manual
> > says about R: "... Among other things it has ... a well developed, simple
> > and effective programming language (Called 'S') ... ". Now I'm a little
> > confused. This means that language S is a component part of R? And S is
> not
> > free? But R is free? Or the mentioned S is only "a free implementation"
> of
> > the "true S"? Can anybody explain this? I want to know.
> >
> > Thank you!
> >
>
> 'S' is a language, invented at Bell Labs
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)) which has two
> major implementations. S-Plus, which is a commercial product, and R,
> which you know well.
>
> R was originally quite like S/S-Plus, but it's changed over time and
> diverged aways and now I believe the R README says R is 'not unlike'
> S.
>
> Consider, e.g., Python, which is a language (specified in
> documentation) with multiple implementations: CPython, PyPy, Jython,
> IronPython, etc. If R and S-Plus had identical functionality they
> would be different concrete realizations of the abstract 'S' language,
> but they're more than slightly different in practice.
>
> Not sure if that helps at all....
>
> Michael
>



-- 
Iurie Malai

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