[plt-scheme] Scheme and R

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:17:04PM -0400, Prabhakar Ragde wrote:
> R is a free, open-source language for statistical computing that is 
> gaining in popularity (to the extent that the New York Times has written 
> about it). The required stats course that our students take has 
> apparently been using it for a while.
> 
> One of the inspirations for R was Scheme. R is not purely functional, 
> but has lexical scoping, closures, and many built-in higher-order 
> functions.

It sounds very much like one of the languages envisaged in Landin's 
classic paper, "The Next 700 Programming Languages", published in the 
late 60's or early 70's.

Algol 60 had a lot of that, except that closures weren't first-class 
objects.

-- hendrik