The ESS environment is built on the open-source projects of many contributors, dating back over 10 years. Doug Bates and Ed Kademan wrote S-mode in 1989 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 process interaction based on Olin Shivers' comint package.

John Sall wrote GNU Emacs macros for SAS source code around 1990. Tom Cook added more functionality creating SAS-mode which was distributed in 1994.  Also 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.

  * The multiple process code, and the idea for ess-eval-line-and-next-line are by Rod Ball.

  * Thanks to Doug Bates for many useful suggestions.

  * Thanks to Martin Maechler for reporting and fixing bugs, providing many useful comments and suggestions, and for maintaining the S-mode mailing list.

  * Thanks to Frank Ritter for updates from the previous version, the menu code, and invaluable comments on the manual.

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

  * Last but definitely not least, thanks to the many beta testers of the S-mode and ESS mailing lists.

ESS version 5 is being developed and currently maintained by

     [file authors.texi not included]