[HACKERS] new procedural language - PL/R

[Joe Conway]

I'm nearing completion of a new procedural language, PL/R. It provides an interface to the R Statistical Computing language. R is similar to the commercial package S-Plus; for more on R see:
http://www.r-project.org/

Here is the first paragraph of their intro:
"R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R."

Before I post the source somewhere, I have a few questions:

1) R itself is under GPL, and as far as I can tell the shared library libR.so is also under GPL, not LGPL. I assume that means I need to release plr under GPL -- does that sound correct?

2) Knowing the trend to move stuff *out* of the PostgreSQL source tarball, and assuming plr is released under GPL, is there any chance that it would be accepted into src/pl or contrib, or should I start a gborg project (I'd prefer if it could at least live in contrib)? If I am somehow able to release it under a BSD license, would that change the answer (if so, I'll at least ask the r-devel list about LGPL on the shared library)?

3) The only major feature not yet developed is the ability to handle triggers. Any strong feelings on whether this is necessary for a first release? I see that pl/perl doesn't handle triggers. It seems like using a plpgsql trigger to call a plr function is a reasonable workaround.

Thanks for any thoughts or comments.

Joe


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