4 ms·
If we talk about the Lisp family of languages (Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Logo, Dylan, ISLisp, Picolisp, MDL, etc. etc.), then R is actually a Lisp dialect. From the
by lispm 11y ago
If we talk about the Lisp family of languages (Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Logo, Dylan, ISLisp, Picolisp, MDL, etc. etc.), then R is actually a Lisp dialect. From the past. R's basic technology is rooted in the Lisp's of the 70s. Even Fexprs are back.
- peatmoss 11y agoAnd was actually implemented on top of scheme originally. Ross Ihaka talks about it in his "back to the future" paper.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y agoIt is mentioned on page 2: "However, the case of the R programming language is particularly interesting, because initially it was just a harmless implementation of Scheme; but then as a result of the irresponsible experiments of mad scientists it mutated into a monster [3].", where [3] is the link to https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pdf https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/JSM-2010.pd...
- lispm 11y agoR turned into a language which used older Lisp features. It no longer resembles Scheme, but both older and then newer Lisp systems. It even provides OOP derived from CLOS. It's really a vey strange language which provides/uses a lot of features, which can make it difficult to maintain (my guess having read about the language, but have not used it). For example a mix of lazy evaluation and fexprs can make understanding and predicting the behavior of code very difficult.