R programming language

The R programming language, sometimes described as GNU S programming language , is a mathematical language and environment used for statistical analysis and display. It was originally created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (hence the name R) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now steadily developed further by a large community around the world.

It is based upon . The commercial implementation of S is S-PLUS [http://www.insightful.com/products/splus].

R s source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and many Unix operating systems. There are several Graphical user interfaces for R (RKWard, Sciviews, etc.).

R is highly extensible through the use of packages, which are user submitted Library_(computer_science) for specific functions or specific areas of study. A core set of packages are included with the installation of R, with many more available at the comprehensive R archive network, CRAN. The bioinformatics community has seeded a successful effort to use R for the analysis of data from molecular biology laboratory.

=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 in a program such as GNU Octave or its proprietary counterpart, MATLAB.

It should not be confused with the R package [http://www.bio.umontreal.ca/Casgrain/en/labo/R/index.html], a collection of programs for multidimensional and spatial analysis available on Macintosh and VAX/VMS systems.

=External links=

*[http://www.r-project.org/ The R Project for Statistical Computing] *[http://www.cran.r-project.org/ The CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) Project] *[http://www.math.montana.edu/Rweb/ Web-based interface to R] *[http://www.network-theory.co.uk/R/base/ 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) *[http://fawn.unibw-hamburg.de/cgi-bin/Rwiki.plRwikiHome The R Wiki] User contributed R documentation and how to information. *[http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques The R Graph Gallery] shows several examples of graphics generated by R *Journal of Statistical Software -- peer-reviewed journal publishing many R related papers