The R programming language, sometimes described as "GNU S", is a mathematical language and environment used for statistical analysis and display. It was originally created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (hence the name R) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now steadily developed further by a large community around the world.

It is based upon S, which was developed by John Chambers of Bell Laboratories and described in the paper "Evolution of the S Language" [1]. R is considered by its developers to be an implementation of S, with semantics derived from Scheme. The commercial implementation of S is S-PLUS [2].

R is freely available under the GNU GPL and is available for Windows, Macintosh, and many Unix operating systems. There are several GUI for R (RKWard, Sciviews , etc.).

R is extensible through the use of packages, which are user submitted libraries for specific functions or specific areas of study. A core set of packages are included with the installation of R, with many more available at the comprehensive R archive network, CRAN.

Comparison with other programs

Although R is mostly used by statisticians, and other people in need of statistics, it can also be used as a general matrix calculation toolbox such as MATLAB.

External links

• The R Project for Statistical Computing
• The CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) Project
• Web-based interface to R
• The R Reference Manual - Base Package by the R Development Core Team. ISBN 0-9546120-0-0 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-9546120-1-9 (vol. 2)
• The R Wiki