[chuckbone]

The best thing that can happen to R would be to rewrite the parser in Haskell and make R a domain specific language. Leave the stats/R language to statisticians who originally designed R, and bring in the Comp Sci crowd to actually make a meaningful speedup.

[hadley]

That's an unusual suggestion - I haven't heard anyone complain about R's parser before. It's also hard to argue that R is a DSL (at least in the spirit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language). There are many features of R, features that make it particularly well suited to statistics and data analysis, that would be very difficult to reproduce in an embedded DSL (missing values are one particularly important example)