R LANGUAGE

is a free, cooperatively developed, open-source implementation of the S statistical programming language and computing environment, a language that has become a standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software. Over the last decade, the R project has become a key tool for implementing sophisticated data analysis algorithms in fields ranging from biology to social and political sciences. R language was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and currently developed by the R Development Core Team. R is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S. The project was conceived in 1992, with an initial version released in 1995 and another one in 2000.

R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R. There are about eight packages supplied with the R distribution and many more are available through the CRAN family of Internet sites covering a very wide range of modern statistics.

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, etc.) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible.

One of R’s strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and various complex formulas where needed. Importantly, the user can retain full control and add to the R codes tree. Also, R comes equipped with a rather unlikely mix of features and considered to be one of the most functional languages.

R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.