From tlumley at u.washington.edu  Mon Mar 16 09:26:27 2009
From: tlumley at u.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 01:26:27 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [Rd] Definition of [[
In-Reply-To: <49BD76A6.6090206@idi.ntnu.no>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.43.0903160126270.14839@hymn33.u.washington.edu>

On Sun, 15 Mar 2009, Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote:

> Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>>
>> Well, that's one issue.  But another is that there should be a
>> specification addressed to users, who should not have to understand
>> internals.
>>
>
> this should really be taken seriously.
>

Well, the lack of such a specification is a documented bug (see the FAQ on bug reporting), and I think everyone agrees it would be useful, just not as useful as what they would have to stop doing to write it.  In fact, such a document may well have a higher priority than it deserves: people who would want that sort of documentation are overrepresented in R-core compared to the general R user community.

There was a panel talk at DSC2005 (yes, four years ago) on the possibilities for a joint R/S language standard. That would have provided an external stimulus and a framework for finding all the inconsistencies. It didn't really eventuate.

      -thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle



[Rd] Definition of [[
Thomas Lumley