R (programming

language)
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Paradigms Multi-paradigm​: ​Array​, ​object-oriented​, ​imperative​,

Designed by Ross Ihaka​ and ​Robert Gentleman

Developer R Core Team​[1]

First August 1993; 25 years ago​[2]

Stable 3.5.1 ("Feather Spray")​[3]​ / July 2, 2018; 4 months

Typing Dynamic
discipline
 License GNU GPL v2​[4]

Filename .r, .R, .RData, .rds, .rda

Website www.r-project.org

Influenced by

● Common Lisp
● S
[2]
● Scheme​
● XLispStat

Influenced

[5]
Julia​

● ​R Programming​ at Wikibooks

R​​ is a ​programming language​ and ​free​ software environment for ​statistical computing​ and graphics
[6]​
supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing.​ The R language is widely used among

[7]​ [8]​
statisticians​ and ​data miners​ for developing ​statistical software​ and ​data analysis​.​ Polls, ​data mining

surveys​ and studies of scholarly literature databases, show substantial increases in popularity in recent
[9]​
years.​ As of August 2018, R ranks 18th in the ​TIOBE index​, a measure of popularity of programming

[10]
languages.​

[11]​
A ​GNU package​ , ​source code​ for the R software environment is written primarily in ​C​, ​Fortran​ and ​R

[12]​
itself​ and is freely available under the ​GNU General Public License​. Pre-compiled binary versions are

provided for various ​operating systems​. Although R has a ​command line interface​, there are several
[13]​[14]
graphical user interfaces​, such as ​RStudio​, an ​Integrated development environment​ .​

Contents

1​History
2​Statistical features
3​Programming features
4​Packages
5​Milestones
6​Interfaces
 7​Implementations
8​R communities
9​useR! conferences
10​R Journal
11​Comparison with SAS, SPSS, and Stata
12​Commercial support for R
13​Examples
13.1​Basic syntax
13.2​Structure of a function
13.3​Mandelbrot set
14​See also
15​References
16​External links

History​[​edit​]
R is an implementation of the ​S programming language​ combined with ​lexical scoping​ semantics, inspired
[15]​
by ​Scheme​.​ ​S​ was created by ​John Chambers​ in 1976, while at ​Bell Labs​. There are some important

[16]
differences, but much of the code written for S runs unaltered.​

[17]​
R was created by ​Ross Ihaka​ and ​Robert Gentleman​ at the ​University of Auckland​, New Zealand, and

[18]​
currently developed by the ​R Development Core Team​ (of which Chambers is a member).​ R is named

[19]​
partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of ​S​.​ The project

[20]​[21]​[22]
was conceived in 1992, with an initial version released in 1995 and a stable beta version in 2000.​

Statistical features​[​edit​]
R and its libraries implement a wide variety of statistical and ​graphical​ techniques, including ​linear​ and
nonlinear​ modelling, classical statistical tests, ​time-series analysis​, classification, clustering, and others. R
is easily extensible through functions and extensions, and the R community is noted for its active
contributions in terms of packages. Many of R's standard functions are written in R itself, which makes it
easy for users to follow the algorithmic choices made. For computationally intensive tasks, ​C​, ​C++​, and
[23]​ [24]​ [25]
Fortran​ code can be ​linked​ and called at run time. Advanced users can write C, C++,​ ​Java​,​ ​.NET​

[26]​
or ​Python​ code to manipulate R objects directly.​ R is highly extensible through the use of user-submitted

packages for specific functions or specific areas of study. Due to its ​S​ heritage, R has stronger
object-oriented programming​facilities than most statistical computing languages. Extending R is also eased
[27]
by its ​lexical scoping​ rules.​
Another strength of R is static graphics, which can produce publication-quality graphs, including
[28]
mathematical symbols. Dynamic and interactive graphics are available through additional packages.​

R has Rd, its own ​LaTeX​-like documentation format, which is used to supply comprehensive
[29]
documentation, both online in a number of formats and in hard copy.​