
Chapter 2
R Language Fundamentals
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter we introduce the basic language data types and discuss
their capabilities and structures. Then topics such as flow-control, iteration,
subsetting and exception handling will be presented. R directly supports two
different object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigms, which are discussed
in detail in Chapter 3. Many operations in R are vectorized, and understand-
ing and using vectorization is an essential component of becoming a proficient
programmer.
The R language was primarily designed as a language for data manipula-
tion, modeling and visualization, and many of the data structures reflect ...