`S Programming' by W.N. Venables & B.D. Ripley
==============================================

Errata and comments for the third printing (January 2004).


R changes
=========

As R has developed, it has adopted a number of the features of S4.
As from R 1.7.0 the S4 class system is available by default, although
as in S-PLUS 5/6 it is not widely used.

p.  26  (footnote 18).  R has a method for as.matrix() to make a full matrix
	from the results of dist.

p.  48  restart() has been removed from R in favour of try().

p.  59  R 1.6.0 introduced `namespaces' for the base package.  From
	objects in a namespace the search order is slightly different:
	the namespace is searched before the user's workspace
	.GlobalEnv.  This means that when searching for object from a
	function defined in base, it is impossible to mask the
	definitions of objects in the base package.  As from R 1.7.0
	several other packages have namespaces, and not all objects in
	the package are `exported', that is visible except to other
	objects in the package.

p.  77  As from R 1.7.0, UseMethod uses the class as reported by
	class(), not just the class attribute.  This means it
	dispatches to classes such as "matrix" and "numeric".  
	However, members of the group generics, such as the binary 
	operators, dispatch only on the class attribute, for efficiency.

p.  99  R also has a version of the S4 formal class system available in
	its package `methods' (from 1.4.0), and from 1.7.0 this is
	loaded by default.  There are some small differences (for
	example, class "named" is not used).

p. 131  It is important not to mix calls to malloc/free and Calloc/Free. 
	These may use different memory allocators (and on the Windows
	port they do in R >= 1.2.0).

p. 136  R now has rwarn and rexit to be called from Fortran,
	equivalent to warning() and stop() respectively.

p. 181	`R modes' for other editors have been produced: see
	Software->Other on CRAN.

p. 200  It is often easiest to let `R CMD build mypkg' build the
	indices, possibly editing them afterwards.

p. 201  It is often easiest to use Rcmd INSTALL and Rcmd build to
	install and bundle-up packages, respectively.

p. 249  Both RGui and Rterm save the history in file .Rhistory if and
	only if the workspace is saved, in the same way as R under
	Unix.

p. 250  R_NSIZE and R_VSIZE are no longer used.

p. 254  R under Windows has Rcmd BATCH


S-PLUS changes
==============

The following are changes that have been made for S-PLUS 6.x for Unix
or Windows.  In the interests of efficiency these versions are often
stricter, so some S3 constructions no longer work.

p.   6  The set of letters allowed in syntatic names is
	locale-dependent as from S-PLUS 6.1.

p.  54	There is a new function sys.time() under Windows which returns
	a two-element vector giving the total cpu time (NA on 95/98/ME)
	and the elapsed time in seconds.

p. 133  <newredef.h> is now included by <S.h> under Windows unless 
	NO_NEWIO is defined, so the programmer need take no action.

p. 135f  The is_na mode constants like DOUBLE have been renamed to e.g.
	S_MODE_DOUBLE.

p. 149	We believe all current versions of S-PLUS do use an ISO (aka
	ANSI) C compiler.

p. 159  For() is implemented in S-PLUS 6.1 for Windows but very
	incompletely documented and fails on our example.

p. 181  S-PLUS 6.x for Windows also has script windows with some
	formatting features.

Sections 8.3 and 8.4  The way on-line help is handled has changed: see our
	on-line complements for S-PLUS 6 for Windows.

p. 205  The preferences are in directory .prefs not _Prefs in S-PLUS
	6.x for Windows.

p. 213	An object explorer is also used in 6.x.

p. 227  The type library is now called sp6oj.tlb.

Section A.4  For the revised procedures under versions 6.x, see the
	on-line complements.