[ESS] proposal re: underscore, part 2

[Rodney Sparapani]

Jack Tanner wrote:
> If you guys really want to stay ahead of the curve, Andrew Gelman and 
> colleagues are developing a new modeling language called Stan, with 
> another R-ish, BUGS-ish syntax (that's neither quite BUGS or R).
> 
> Here's an example of a BUGS model and how it would be written in Stan:
> 
> https://code.google.com/p/stan/wiki/Surgical
> 
>  From the development and discussion around Stan, I'm guessing it will 
> be very widely used. The Stan manual, in SVN on stan.googlecode.com, is 
> pretty good.

I have heard of it, but I didn't know that the syntax was different.
Why does everyone have to come up with their own syntax?!?  Not looking
forward to coding yet another variant of ESS[BUGS].  Remember that the
original BUGS language has morphed, although, the BUGS and JAGS model
implementations are now nearly identical; the command language has
many variants: original BUGS, WinBUGS, OpenBUGS and JAGS!  I'm very 
thankful to the authors, but doesn't anyone consider backward 
compatibility any more (I know that we do here at ESS ;o)  Sorry,
I just needed to vent.

Rodney