R programming language - Definition and Overview

The R programming language, sometimes described as "GNU S", is a mathematical language and environment used for statistical analysis and display.

It is based upon S which was developed by John Chambers of Bell Laboratories and described in the paper "Evolution of the S Language" [1] (http://cm.bell-labs.com/stat/doc/96.7.ps). R is considered by its developers to be an implementation of S, with semantics derived from Scheme. The commercial implementation of S is S-PLUS [2] (http://www.insightful.com/products/splus).

R is freely available under the GNU GPL and is available for Windows, Macintosh, and many Unix operating systems.

Comparison with other programs

Although R is mostly used by statisticans, and other people in need of statistics, it can also be used as a general matrix calculation toolbox such as MATLAB.

External links

• The R Project for Statistical Computing (http://www.r-project.org/)
• The CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) Project (http://www.cran.r-project.org/)
• Web-based interface to R (http://www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/)
• The R Reference Manual - Base Package (http://www.network-theory.co.uk/R/base/) by the R Development Core Team. ISBN 0-9546120-0-0 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-9546120-1-9 (vol. 2)
• The R Wiki (http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.pl?RwikiHome)