Burns P.J. S Poetry

Patrick J. Burns, 1998. — 439 p.Five great strengths of S are its variety of objects, its vector orientation, the power of subscripting, object-oriented programming and graphics. Each of these is explored before turning to other matters.
A powerful and fairly unique part of S that will be addressed in later chapters is the possibility of computing on the language. Essentially everything in S for instance, a call to a function|is an S object. One viewpoint is that S has self-knowledge. This self-awareness makes a lot of things possible in S that are not in other languages.
Of fundamental importance is that S is a language. This makes S much more useful than if it were merely a \package" for statistics or graphics or mathematics. Imagine if English were not a language, but merely a collection of words that could only be used individually a package. Then what is expressed in this sentence is far more complex than any meaning that could be expressed with the English package.