[gaius]

Saving state between runs. R has surpassed Python for me just for that feature, for interactive exploration.

[peatmoss]

I've never found a case where I've wanted to retain state between R sessions (I think doing so can be an anti-pattern).

But... that image saving feature is very much like that of Common Lisp. Given Ross Ihaka's then-and-now fondness for CL, I'd be shocked if this feature weren't very much intentionally patterned off that. The original implementation of R was on top of a Scheme runtime, but I don't know if images were (then) a feature.

[sedachv]

R workspaces are an idea borrowed from APL: http://aplwiki.com/LearnApl/AplWorkspace

Common Lisp and Scheme do not have any specifications for persistent state, and the implementations that do have images are all over the place in what those images do and how they are made.