[R] xlispstat and R

[A.J. Rossini]

> From: Wensui Liu <liuwensui at gmail.com>


> Just curious how xlispstat is used in the industry and what's it strengthen
> compared with other computing languages such as R or matlab?

Almost not at all, though there are a few holdouts.

On a related note, I've been doing some interesting things with a
branch of LispStat for CommonLisp.  It'll be more interesting when R
gets embedded (now it's back on topic).  Rumor has it that R is
embedded within SBCL, which makes for an interesting distributed
computing environment.

It's a nice system, it still works, it's got some reasonable (though
old) tools, numerically it needs a good bit of work and updating, but
for a 17-year old program, it works quite nicely.  Dynamic graphics
are comparable to GGobi's (more flexible, but less scalable).  Plus,
it truly works cross platform.

CommonLispStat is fast (SBCL and CMUCL are compiled, not interpreted,
commonlisps), but needs a bit of work with numerics (SBCL isn't
stable), and Graphics (CLISP doesn't quite like it yet;  though tk and
gtk2 supported), and decisions about object systems (the old
prototypes vs. CLOS) are still open, both being available at this
point.

Also back on topic, Duncan T-L had a nice embedding of R/XLispStat
that worked nicely, but XLIsp isn't a rapidly evolving language,
unlike the OSS common lisps.

best,
-tony

blindglobe at gmail.com
Muttenz, Switzerland.
"Commit early,commit often, and commit in a repository from which we can easily
roll-back your mistakes" (AJR, 4Jan05).