About

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Introduction

R is a computer language not entirely unlike the S language developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Rick Becker, John Chambers and Allan Wilks. The two languages are implemented quite differently, but bear enough superficial resemblence that users should be able to switch between the two with relative ease. Currently the software is undergoing active development. Discussion of the development process is carried out on the "r-devel" mailing list.

We have implemented R in what we hope is a very portable fashion and in way which requires relatively little in the way of machine resources. Implementations exist for many for many members of the Unix family of operating systems, including AIX, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, HPUX, Irix, MacOS X, Solaris, and Tru64. In addition there is a version for Microsoft Windows (9x, ME, NT4, 2000, XP).

Present Status

The present version implements most of the functionality in the 1988 S book (the "Blue Book") and many of the applications. In addition, we have implemented much of the functionality from the 1992 S book (the "White Book"). In particular we have versions of "lm", "glm", "aov" and "loess", and versions of "gam" and "tree" are available in contributed packages. There are several manuals in the distribution, plus a comprehensive set of help pages in "output independent" form which can be used to create versions for HTML, LaTeX, text, PDF etc.