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Domain specific languages
The combination of first class environments, lexical scoping, nonstandard evaluation, and metaprogramming gives us a powerful toolkit for creating embedded domain specific languages (DSLs) in R. Embedded DSLs take advantage of a host language’s parsing and execution framework, but adjust the semantics to make them more suitable for a specific task. DSLs are a very large topic, and this chapter will only scratch the surface, focussing on important implementation techniques rather than on how you might come up with the language in the first place. If you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend Domain Specific Languages (http://amzn.com/0321712943?tag=devtools-20) by Martin Fowler. It discusses many options ...
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