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by bachmeier 1671 days ago
I'll just point out that R started as a Scheme dialect. If you dig into the source, you'll see that the main C data structure is the SEXP, for s-expression. And as the other comment says, you can call everything as a function. You can write an s-expression form of R in about 30 minutes. Literally all you have to do is identify opening and closing parens and rewrite in `function`(arguments) form.
1 comments

Ooooooh wow, I remember digging into R internals a while ago for something and seeing `sexp`, and only NOW am I connecting it to Lisp's SEXP!! That makes so much sense!

Does RData derive from LISP images? Because if so, that'd be quite the revelation to me.

RData only stores the environment of the session. It doesn't store the current search path (you need to reload libraries). I believe it's not a full binary image like LISP