[R] Is there a facility in R similar to MatLab "syms" that allows using unevaluated numeric symbols in matrices?

[Dylan Arena]

Hi,


I'm trying to use R to get eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix 
whose elements are of the form (2 * lambda), -(lambda + mu), etc.  I'd 
like R to treat this matrix as a numeric matrix without treating lambda 
and mu as variable names but rather as some sort of atomic quantities 
(and hence give eigenvectors in terms of mu and/or lambda).  MatLab and 
Mathematica both do this, but I'm not sure whether R does.  Does anyone 
have any ideas about how to do this?


Please let me know,
Dylan