I suspect there may be some rationale that "package" seems more appropriately descriptive. However, is it so much more precise that it justifies creating a distinction between S-Plus and R?
Or is it your intention to make it harder for people who have to use S-Plus to also use R? Or do you want to make it more difficult for people to write code that will work in both S-Plus and R or for people to migrate from S-Plus to R or vice versa? Unless that is your intent, I'd like to know why you don't make the complementary change, namely globally replace "package" with "library" everywhere in the documentation -- or at least deprecate its future use.
R is a marvelous creation, a solid contribution to the advancement of science and through that human knowledge and eventually even the ability of people everywhere to live more comfortably, longer.
spencer graves
p.s. I'm told that the French Royal Academy delayed the introduction in France of a product marketed by a US company. The product couldn't be sold in France without a French language manual. The translation could not be published until the French Royal Academy officially provided or blessed new French words for new technical terms. Similarly, Le Monde Diplomatique recently carried an article proposing "A polyglot world to escape the English dictatorship." (January 2005, pp. 22-23: "Un monde polyglotte pour echapper a la dictature de l'anglais'; someone may wish to correct my translation.) We could require all r-help subscribers to learn enough French, German, Spanish AND Portuguese to be able to read posts in those languages, but that might be counterproductive.
Peter Dalgaard wrote:
"A.J. Rossini" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
For OBVIOUS reasons, is there any chance that we could introduce
"package()" and deprecate "library()"?
usepackage() or usePackage() has been suggested, but someone got ambitious and wanted it to be different from library(), and it sort of didn't get any further. We still have some time before feature freeze for 2.1.0 though.
(well, I'll also ask if we could deprecate "=" for assignment, but
that's hopeless).
You're not *forced* to use it...
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