[plt-scheme] Scheme and R

I've written a fair amount of code in R, and I would say that other than its
lexicalish scoping for functions it bears little relation to scheme.  It
seems to belong strongly to the class of 'scripting' languages that sprang
up in the mid eighties such as tcl, perl and matlab.  Its popularity stems
from the fact that most of the strange design decisions end up being
extremely convenient for the class of problems that it is used to attack.

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:17 PM, Prabhakar Ragde <plragde at uwaterloo.ca>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.
>
> I'm wondering if anyone on this list has experience with teaching R or with
> making explicit the connections between R and Scheme. I'd like to take more
> notice of this in our first-year CS classes, and help prepare students for
> the use of R in their second-yearI stats class. --PR
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