From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Mon Apr 18 11:20:57 2005
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Mon Apr 18 11:21:08 2005
Subject: [Rd] A 'true' R-wrapper for C++ classes
In-Reply-To: <BAY17-F25AAF617A04C82EF46FB7CD1290@phx.gbl>
References: <BAY17-F25AAF617A04C82EF46FB7CD1290@phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0504181009160.17593@gannet.stats>

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Ali - wrote:

> I am trying to wrap some C++ classes into R.
>
> (1) Comparing the OOP and methods packages, I have came to this conclusion 
> that OOP works much better for this wrapper -- please correct me if I am 
> wrong. One question is why this useful package (OOP) is not included in the 
> official release of R?

Quick answer: almost nothing else makes use of it.  The `methods' package 
is depended on by 27 CRAN packages and most BioC packages.  The OOP 
package is not even on CRAN (although it once was as part of Omegahat).

The official release of R contains packages that are thought to be of high 
quality, actively maintained and useful to a wide range of R users.  And 
those are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones -- an at least 
historic criterion was to fill out coverage of the S Blue and White books
and the sort of statistics covered by MASS (the book).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


[Rd] A 'true' R-wrapper for C++ classes
Prof Brian Ripley