[R-SIG-Mac] R 2.10.0

[Luca Scrucca]

Dear Simon,

first of all I would like to thank you for providing the Mac binary  
package for the latest version of R.
It works ok on my two years old MBP with OSX 10.5.8.
As mentioned in the web page the GUI installed are two, 32-bit GUI  
(R.app) and 64-bit GUI (R64.app).
I noticed that running a simple loop in the two GUI I got different  
values. For example, having defined the function

fun <- function(n)
{ for(i in 1:n)
      median(rnorm(100000))
}

I obtained the following typical timings:

[R.app GUI 1.30 (5511) i386-apple-darwin9.8.0]
 > system.time(fun(1000))
    user  system elapsed
  30.131   2.460  32.506

[R.app GUI 1.30 (5511) x86_64-apple-darwin9.8.0]
 > system.time(fun(1000))
    user  system elapsed
  24.927   2.151  26.957

The second is always smaller, although my MBP is not 64 bit. Can you  
comment on that? I'm just curious.

I also noticed that running R64.app the X11 environment is also  
started (the graphical device is the default, i.e. quartz). This does  
not happen with R.app.

Aside, there is a broken link in the web page http://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/ 
, namely the link to the tools directory for R-2.10.0.pkg (there is a  
missing 's' in the URL).

Best,

Luca


--------------------------------------------------
Luca Scrucca
Dipartimento di Economia, Finanza e Statistica
Sezione di Statistica
Università degli Studi di Perugia
Via A. Pascoli, 20
06123 PERUGIA  (ITALY)
Tel. +39-075-5855233
Fax: +39-075-5855950
E-mail:   luca at stat.unipg.it
Web page: http://www.stat.unipg.it/luca