[plt-scheme] Scheme and R

Noel Welsh wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Neil Toronto <ntoronto at cs.byu.edu> wrote:
>
>> As a language it's rather weak and inconsistent.
> 
> I agree with this, and the rest of Neil's analysis.  It would be
> simple to create a PLT Scheme language that extends the numeric
> operators to vectors in addition to scalars. Perhaps one should also
> replace the list operations with the vector equivalents. This could be
> used to introduce R-esque programming.

Thanks, Noel and Neil. I haven't seen anything to contradict these 
points, or what Sungwoo Park says. I have zero influence on the choice 
of the stats instructors to use R, and they seem to be doing little or 
no language teaching, relying on Web materials and simple examples in 
the text of assignment questions to guide students in their solutions. 
The quality of the tutorials and books I have gathered so far made me 
wonder if there was a way to take advantage of students' prior exposure 
to Scheme to help them in their use of R. --PR