[sdenton4]

From your link, hilariously relevant to the blog post at hand:

"First, scalar computations in R are very slow. This in part because the R interpreter is very slow, but also because there are a no scalar types. By introducing scalars and using compilation it looks like its possible to get a speedup by a factor of several hundred for scalar computations. This is important because it means that many ghastly uses of array operations and the apply functions could be replaced by simple loops. The cost of these improvements is that scope declarations become mandatory and (optional) type declarations are necessary to help the compiler."