> P.S. Is there any particular reason why there are so seldom answers to posts > regarding foreach and all these doMC/doSMP packages ? Do so few people use > these packages or does this have anything to do with the commercial origin of > these packages?
Jannis, An interesting question. I'm a huge fan of foreach and the parallel backends, and have used foreach in some of my packages. It leaves the choice of backend to the user, rather than forcing some environment. If you like multicore, great -- the package doesn't care. Someone else may use doSNOW. No problem. To answer your question, foreach was originally written by (primarily, at least) Steve Weston, previously of REvolution Computing. It, along with some of the parallel backends (perhaps all at this point, I'm out of touch) are available open-source. Hence, I'd argue that the "commercial origin" is a moot point -- it doesn't matter, it will always be available, and it's really useful. Steve is no longer with REvolution, however, and I can't speak for the responsiveness/interest of current REvolution folks on this point. Scanning R-help daily for things relating to my own packages is something I try to do, but it doesn't always happen. I would like to think foreach is widely used -- it does have a growing list of reverse depends/suggests. And was updated as recently as last May, I just noticed. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/index.html Jay -- John W. Emerson (Jay) Associate Professor of Statistics Department of Statistics Yale University http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.