@cindex comint
@cindex authors
@cindex credits

The ESS environment is built on the open-source projects of
many contributors, dating back nearly 15 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.

@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 S-mode mailing
list.

@item
Thanks to Frank Ritter for updates from the previous version, 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
Last but definitely not least, thanks to the many beta testers of the
S-mode and ESS mailing lists.
@end itemize

@emph{ESS} version 5 is being developed and currently maintained by

@include authors.texi
