Domain-Specific Languages in R: Advanced Statistical Programming

 Table of Contents....4

About the Author....7

About the Technical Reviewer....8

Chapter 1: Introduction....9

Who This Book Is For....9

Domain-Specific Languages....10

Chapter 2: Matrix Expressions....17

Parsing Expressions....18

Meta-Programming Parsing....22

Expression Manipulation....26

Optimizing Multiplication....28

Expression Rewriting....31

Expression Evaluation....35

Chapter 3: Components of a Programming Language....38

Text, Tokens, Grammars, and Semantics....39

Specifying a Grammar....43

Designing Semantics....53

Chapter 4: Functions, Classes, and Operators....61

The S3 Object-Oriented Programming System....62

Objects and Classes....62

Generic Functions....64

Operator Overloading....69

Group Generics....74

Precedence and Evaluation Order....76

Code Blocks....79

Chapter 5: Parsing and Manipulating Expressions....82

Quoting and Evaluating....83

Exploring Expressions....89

Manipulating Expressions....99

Chapter 6: Lambda Expressions....106

Anonymous functions....106

Experiments with Alternatives to the Syntax....109

Don’t Do This at Home....112

Chapter 7: Environments and Expressions....113

Scopes and Environments....113

Default Parameters, Lazy Evaluation, and Promises....118

Quotes and Non-standard Evaluation....128

Chapter 8: Tidy Evaluation....139

Quosures....140

Quasi-quoting....151

Chapter 9: List Comprehension....162

Chapter 10: Continuous-Time Markov Chains....170

Constructing the Markov Chain....173

Constructing a Rate Matrix....177

Traces....180

Computing Likelihoods....183

Chapter 11: Pattern Matching....186

Constructors....188

Pattern Matching....199

Lists....206

Search Trees....210

Chapter 12: Dynamic Programming....217

Parsing Expressions....223

Evaluating Expressions....231

Fixing the Evaluation Environment....244

Chapter 13: Conclusion....248

References....250

Index....251

Gain an accelerated introduction to domain-specific languages in R, including coverage of regular expressions. This compact, in-depth book shows you how DSLs are programming languages specialized for a particular purpose, as opposed to general purpose programming languages. Along the way, you’ll learn to specify tasks you want to do in a precise way and achieve programming goals within a domain-specific context.

Domain-Specific Languages in R includes examples of DSLs including large data sets or matrix multiplication; pattern matching DSLs for application in computer vision; and DSLs for continuous time Markov chains and their applications in data science. After reading and using this book, you’ll understand how to write DSLs in R and have skills you can extrapolate to other programming languages.

What You'll Learn

• Program with domain-specific languages using R
• Discover the components of DSLs
• Carry out large matrix expressions and multiplications
• Implement metaprogramming with DSLs
• Parse and manipulate expressions

Who This Book Is For

Those with prior programming experience. R knowledge is helpful but not required.