5 The ESS environment is built on the open-source projects of many
6 contributors, dating back to 1989 where Doug Bates and Ed Kademan wrote
7 S-mode to edit S and Splus files in GNU Emacs. Frank Ritter and Mike
8 Meyer added features, creating version 2. Meyer and David Smith made
9 further contributions, creating version 3. For version 4, David Smith
10 provided significant enhancements to allow for powerful process
13 John Sall wrote GNU Emacs macros for SAS source code around 1990. Tom
14 Cook added functions to submit jobs, review listing and log files, and
15 produce basic views of a dataset, thus creating a SAS-mode which was
18 In 1994, A.J. Rossini extended S-mode to support XEmacs. Together
19 with extensions written by Martin Maechler, this became version 4.7
20 and supported S, Splus, and R. In 1995, Rossini extended SAS-mode to
23 In 1997, Rossini merged S-mode and SAS-mode into a single Emacs
24 package for statistical programming; the product of this marriage was
25 called ESS version 5. Richard M. Heiberger designed the inferior mode
26 for interactive SAS and SAS-mode was further integrated into ESS.
27 Thomas Lumley's Stata mode, written around 1996, was also folded into
28 ESS. More changes were made to support additional statistical
29 languages, particularly XLispStat.
31 ESS initially worked only with Unix statistics packages that used
32 standard-input and standard-output for both the command-line interface
33 and batch processing. ESS could not communicate with statistical
34 packages that did not use this protocol. This changed in 1998 when
35 Brian Ripley demonstrated use of the Windows Dynamic Data Exchange
36 (DDE) protocol with ESS. Heiberger then used DDE to provide
37 interactive interfaces for Windows versions of Splus. In 1999, Rodney
38 A. Sparapani and Heiberger implemented SAS batch for ESS relying
39 on files, rather than standard-input/standard-output, for Unix,
40 Windows and Mac. In 2001, Sparapani added BUGS batch file processing
41 to ESS for Unix and Windows.
45 The multiple process code, and the idea for
46 @code{ess-eval-line-and-next-line} are by Rod Ball.
49 Thanks to Doug Bates for many useful suggestions.
52 Thanks to Martin Maechler for reporting and fixing bugs, providing many
53 useful comments and suggestions, and for maintaining the ESS mailing
57 Thanks to Frank Ritter for updates, particularly the menu code, and
58 invaluable comments on the manual.
61 Thanks to Ken'ichi Shibayama for his excellent indenting code, and many
62 comments and suggestions.
65 Thanks to Aki Vehtari for adding interactive BUGS support.
68 Thanks to Brendan Halpin for bug-fixes and updates to Stata-mode.
71 Last, but definitely not least, thanks to the many ESS users and
72 contributors to the ESS mailing lists.
75 @emph{ESS} version 5 is being developed and currently maintained by