@cindex comint
@cindex authors
@cindex credits

The ESS environment is built on the open-source projects of many
contributors, dating back to 1989 where Doug Bates and Ed Kademan wrote
S-mode to edit S and Splus files in GNU Emacs.  Frank Ritter and Mike
Meyer added features, creating version 2.  Meyer and David Smith made
further contributions, creating version 3.  For version 4, David Smith
provided significant enhancements to allow for powerful process
interaction.

John Sall wrote GNU Emacs macros for SAS source code around 1990.  Tom
Cook added functions to submit jobs, review listing and log files, and
produce basic views of a dataset, thus creating a SAS-mode which was
distributed in 1994.

In 1994, A.J. Rossini extended S-mode to support XEmacs.  Together
with extensions written by Martin Maechler, this became version 4.7
and supported S, Splus, and R.  In 1995, Rossini extended SAS-mode to
work with XEmacs.

In 1997, Rossini merged S-mode and SAS-mode into a single Emacs
package for statistical programming; the product of this marriage was
called ESS version 5.  Richard M. Heiberger designed the inferior mode
for interactive SAS and SAS-mode was further integrated into ESS.
Thomas Lumley's Stata mode, written around 1996, was also folded into
ESS.  More changes were made to support additional statistical
languages, particularly XLispStat.

ESS initially worked only with Unix statistics packages that used
standard-input and standard-output for both the command-line interface
and batch processing.  ESS could not communicate with statistical
packages that did not use this protocol.  This changed in 1998 when
Brian Ripley demonstrated use of the Windows Dynamic Data Exchange
(DDE) protocol with ESS.  Heiberger then used DDE to provide
interactive interfaces for Windows versions of Splus.  In 1999, Rodney
A. Sparapani and Heiberger implemented SAS batch for ESS relying
on files, rather than standard-input/standard-output, for Unix,
Windows and Mac.  In 2001, Sparapani added BUGS batch file processing
to ESS for Unix and Windows.

@itemize @bullet
@item
The multiple process code, and the idea for
@code{ess-eval-line-and-next-line} are by Rod Ball.

@item
Thanks to Doug Bates for many useful suggestions.

@item
Thanks to Martin Maechler for reporting and fixing bugs, providing many
useful comments and suggestions, and for maintaining the ESS mailing
lists.

@item
Thanks to Frank Ritter for updates, particularly the menu code, and
invaluable comments on the manual.

@item
Thanks to Ken'ichi Shibayama for his excellent indenting code, and many
comments and suggestions.

@item
Thanks to Aki Vehtari for adding interactive BUGS support.

@item
Thanks to Brendan Halpin for bug-fixes and updates to Stata-mode.

@item
Last, but definitely not least, thanks to the many ESS users and
contributors to the ESS mailing lists.
@end itemize

@emph{ESS} is being developed and currently maintained by

@include authors.texi
