Interfaces for a Quantitative Programming Environment.

This paper presents an approach to interfacing a computing environment for statistics to numerical calculations, text processing and other computations, in the context of the Quantitative Programming Environment (QPE). QPE is a computing environment for statistics and related applications that shares many of the features and much of the design philosophy of "integrated programming environments". It is highly dynamic, treats language and data uniformly, and emphasizes data-directed organization of computations. The QPE user programs in a rich environment of functions and data structures. But the lowest level of function calculations are not built-in; instead they use a set of interfaces to algorithms, tools, and current S functions. QPE is an integrated environment with essentially no built- in primitives. This turns out to be an attractive and practical, if somewhat paradoxical design choice, providing a high degree of flexibility while benefiting from existing solutions to computational problems.