INTRODUCTION
R is a scripting language for statistical data
manipulation and analysis. It was inspired
by, and is mostly compatible with, the sta-
tistical language S developed by AT&T. The
name S, forstatistics, was an allusion to another pro-
gramming language with a one-letter name developed
at AT&T—the famous C language. S later was sold to
a small firm, which added a graphical user interface
(GUI) and named the result S-Plus.
R has become more popular than S or S-Plus, both because it’s free and
because more people are contributing to it. R is sometimes called GNU S,
to reflect its open source nature. (The GNU Project is a major collection of
open source software.)Why Use R for Your Statistical Work?
As the Cantonese say,yauh peng, yauh leng, which means “both inexpensive
and beautiful.” Why use anything else?