February 18, 2014
Dr. Mathew McLean
Postdoc Fellow, Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University
Title: Authoring Packages for the R Programming Language
Abstract:
The talk with cover some intermediate to advanced details of the R programming language with a focus on authoring R extensions (packages). I assume only basic familiarity with writing functions and working with R’s built-in data structures. Useful features of the R language such as lazy loading, lexical scoping, and first-class functions will be reviewed. I will cover working with environments and the three different object oriented systems available in R: S3, S4, and reference classes, with a focus on S3. Important built-in functions for extending R will be introduced and demonstrated with examples. I will discuss debugging and profiling R code as well as checking packages and writing namespace and documentation files. Some useful add-on packages such as codetools, devtools, microbenchmark, roxygen2, and pryr will be introduced along the way.