4 ms·

I'm curious to understand why is born in the first place since we already have many lisp/scheme then... R itself seem a reinvention of the wheel...

• kgwgk 8y ago
  According to an article published in 1996 by Ihaka and Gentleman: “The work has been heavily influenced by two existing languages-Becker, Chambers, and Wilks' S (1985) and Steel and Sussman's Scheme (1975). We felt that there were strong points in each of these languages and that it would be interesting to see if the strengths could be combined. The resulting language is very similar in appearance to S, but the underlying implementation and semantics are derived from Scheme. In fact, we implemented the language by first writing an interpreter for a Scheme subset and then progressively mutating it to resemble S.” (https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/R-paper.pdf https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/R-paper.pdf) Unfortunately R’s gain was LispStat’s loss: https://www.jstatsoft.org/issue/view/v013 https://www.jstatsoft.org/issue/view/v013
  • xte 8y ago
    Thanks :-)
• tejtm 8y ago
  Hear tell it was begat of an unholy tryst between PHP and Excel, but I am not judging. A much less flippant answer it was a work-a-like intended as a successor to a (licensed) stats language 'S'. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)
  • xte 8y ago
    Thanks :-)