From dsamperi at DecisionSynergy.com  Fri Jan 19 19:21:28 2007
From: dsamperi at DecisionSynergy.com (Dominick Samperi)
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:21:28 -0500
Subject: [Rd] C vs. C++ as learning and development tool for R
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References: <836F00680EECD340A96AD34ECFF3B534B4A731@iu-mssg-mbx106.ads.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <45B10C28.3010402@DecisionSynergy.com>

Kimpel, Mark William wrote:
> I have 3 years of experience with R and have an interest in becoming a
> better programmer so that I might someday be able to contribute
> packages. Other than R, my only experience was taking Lisp from Daniel
> Friedman in the 1970's. I would like to learn either C or C++ for
> several reasons:
>
> To gain a better concept of object oriented programming so that I can
> begin to use S4 methods in R.
>
> To perhaps speed up some things I do repeatedly in R
>
> To be able to contribute a package someday.
>   
If you decide to use C++ with R you should check out the documentation
that comes with the package RcppTemplate, and the sample code that
comes with that package. In my experience C++ (or C or FORTRAN) is
needed for many compute intensive tasks, and the R framework provides
a nice front-end with its extensive collection of visualization and
statistical analysis tools.

Disclaimer: I have no experience with S4.

ds



[Rd] C vs. C++ as learning and development tool for R
Dominick Samperi