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R Language
Introduction to R Language
In this article, we are going to learn about R language: what is R language and what is the R language Environment?
Submitted by Ayush Sharma, on October 21, 2018
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics that is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment developed at Bell Laboratories by John Chambers. The S code can run unaltered in R but R is a different implementation of S.
R has provided a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques. It is also highly extensible. R provides an Open Source route to participation for research in statistical methodology. Statisticians and data miners widely use the R language for developing statistical software.
R's strengths are the ease with which it can produce well-designed publication-quality plots, including mathematical symbols and formulae.
R is available as a free software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX and Linux platforms, Windows and MacOS.
The R environment
R is a great tool for software facilities for data manipulation, calculation, and graphical display. It includes:
- Effective data handling and storage facility,
- A similar set of operators for calculations on arrays and matrices,
- A large and integrated collection of intermediate tools for data analysis,
- Graphical facilities for data analysis and display both on screen and paper, and
- A simple effective and well-developed programming language that includes conditionals, loops, user defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.
The term "environment" is used to characterize the language as a fully planned and a system that works together. R is designed around a true computer language, that allows users to add additional functionality by defining new functions. Much of the system is written in the R is similar to the version of S, which makes it easy for users to follow the algorithms. For intensive computational tasks, C, C++ and Fortran code can be linked to the program and called at runtime. Users can also write C code to manipulate R objects directly.
Many users think of R as a statistics system but it is more of an environment within which statistical techniques are implemented. R has very simple and easy packages. There are about eight packages that come already installed with the R distribution and many more are available through the CRAN mirror of Internet sites covering a very wide range of modern statistics. Also, user defined packages can be created and distributed for public use which also eases the task that can be performed by R.
R has its own documentation format, which is used to supply comprehensive documentation.