Thank you all for your input and ideas. It seems this discussion has clarified the purpose of the Rcpp/RcppTemplate package and further demonstrated both creating and linking with an external library as well as utilizing C++ for creating R packages. Moving the Rcpp code base to a separate library encourages using its variable parsing in other packages. Thank you again. -Andy -----Original Message----- From: Dominick Samperi [mailto:dsamperi at DecisionSynergy.com] Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 11:51 AM To: Prof Brian Ripley; Andrew Finley Cc: Dirk Eddelbuettel; Andrew Garbutt; r-devel at r-project.org Subject: Rcpp -> RcppTemplate package with L-GPL The R package previously named Rcpp has been renamed to RcppTemplate (version 1.4), and it is on its way to CRAN. This is clearer because now RcppTemplate is an R package, RcppExample is a sample R function, and Rcpp is a C++ class library. The new package contains the Rcpp class library released under L-GPL instead of the more restrictive GPL, and it has been reorganized so that it can be used like a template for creating R packages that use C++ libraries. In particular, the Rcpp source files have been moved from src to inst/lib, and the static library libRcpp.a is built as part of the package install process. It is linked against when building the package shared library and then deleted. See the latest RcppAPI.pdf file for more information. To view it use vignette("RcppAPI"), or simply fetch the PDF file from RHOME/lib/RcppTemplate/doc/RcppAPI.pdf. Be sure to remove the old package named Rcpp if present, because otherwise there will be two vignettes named RcppAPI, and this confuses vignette() (chokes under Windows). Dominick