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]. 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].
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 statisticians, 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
- The CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) Project
- Web-based interface to R
- The R Reference Manual - Base Package by the R Development Core Team. ISBN 0-9546120-0-0 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-9546120-1-9 (vol. 2)
- The R Wiki