The Big R-Book

♣4♣The Basics of R

In this book we will approach data and analytics from a practitioners point of view and our tool of choice is R. R is in some sense a re-implementation of S – a programming language written in 1976 by John Chambers at Bell Labs – with added lexical scoping semantics. Usually, codewritten in S will also run in R.

S

R is a modern language with a rather short history. In 1992, the R-project was started by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The first version was available in 1995 and the first stable version was available in 2000.

Now, the R Development Core Team (of which Chambers is a member) develops R further and maintains the code. Since a few years Microsoft has embraced the project and provides MRAN (Microsoft R Application Network). This package is also free and open source software (FOSS) and has some advantages over standard R such as enhanced performance (e.g. multi-thread support, the checkpoint package that makes results more reproducible).

FOSS

Essentially, R is …

• a programming language built for statistical analysis, graphics representation and reporting;
• an interpreted computer language which allows branching, looping, modular programming as well as object and functional oriented programming features.

R offers its users …

• integration with the procedures written in the C, C++, .Net, Python, or FORTRAN languages for efficiency;

C

C++

.Net

Fortran

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