On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Spencer Graves wrote:
The reasons to 'introduce "package()" and deprecate "library()"' may be OBVIOUS to you, but they completely escape me. Could you please clarify why that's obvious? I've seen many admonitions on this list that the term is "package" NOT "library", but I don't recall ever seeing any explanation of why the term "package" is more appropriate than "library". 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?
Note that S(-PLUS) does not use `library' for `package', it uses `library section', and that is in the 1988 Blue Book, the manual for the first version of S which was extensible in that way. Only a few observant people used `library section', and when S4 introduced `chapter' (almost but not quite the same thing) few people adopted that either.
There is a need to change the programmatic interface to what library/require do, for example to take character string (only) arguments and to return a suitable classed object, as well as separate out library(help=). This will almost certainly be done (if/when it is done) so that library() remains for ever as a compatibility wrapper, but the new interface (usePackage(), use(), whatever) becomes the preferred one.
-- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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