The , sometimes described as "
GNU S ", is a programming language and software environment for
Statistical computing and graphics. 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 collaborative effort from a
Core Team of developers from around the world.
R is considered by its developers to be an implementation of the
S Programming Language , with semantics derived from
Scheme . The commercial implementation of S is
S-PLUS .
R's source code is freely available under the
GNU GPL and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for
Windows ,
Macintosh , and many
Unix operating systems. R is also highly extensible through the use of packages, which are user-submitted
Libraries 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 ).
There are several
IDE framework.
R provides a freely available downloadable newsletter
{Link without Title} featuring statistical computing and development articles in the
R Programming Language that might be of interest to both ''users'' and ''developers''. It has been in press since January 2001 and is released two to three times a year. The editors are themselves volunteers within the R project. The newsletter is compiled and formatted using the
LaTeX typesetting language to create a high quality document.
LaTeX style files which provide the format style ( ''.sty'' extension) and references (''
.bib '' extension) are also available for download.
The
Bioinformatics Community has seeded a successful effort to use R for the
Analysis of data from
Molecular Biology Laboratories . The
Bioconductor project started in the fall of 2001 provides R packages for the analysis of genomic data. e.g.
Affymetrix and
CDNA microarray object-oriented data handling and analysis tools.
Although R is mostly used by statisticians and other practitioners requiring an environment for statistical computation and software development, it can also be used as a general matrix calculation toolbox with comparable benchmark results
{Link without Title} to
GNU Octave and its proprietary counterpart,
MATLAB .
It should not be confused with the R package
{Link without Title} , a collection of programs for multidimensional and spatial analysis available on Macintosh and VAX/VMS systems.
The
Gnumeric developers are cooperating with the R project for improving the accuracy of Gnumeric.
