[vox-tech] Re: vox-tech Digest, Vol 14, Issue 12

[Karsten M. Self]

on Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 12:38:25PM -0700, Norm Matloff (matloff at cs.ucdavis.edu) wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 12:00:03PM -0700, vox-tech-request at lists.lugod.org wrote:
> 
> > Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 13:45:00 -0700
> > From: Bill Kendrick <nbs at sonic.net>
> > Subject: [vox-tech] [getting OT] R statistics language
>  
> > On Wed, Jul 13, 2005 at 12:31:04PM -0700, Norm Matloff wrote:
> 
> > > R/S+ is multiplatform (the various Unixes, Windows, Macs).
> 
> > So, anyone want to do a talk on this language at LUGOD some time!? :)
> 
> Seems like this question was asked a few months ago. :-)
> 
> I might volunteer at some future time.  Meanwhile, as I said, there is
> my mini-tutorial, at
> 
>    http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/r.html 

Nice...  I'm on the lookout for good R guides.  Trying to put my finger
on what makes it hard to grok.

A licensing rant, though.  You write:

    [R is] a public-domain implementation of the widely-regarded S
    statistical language.  
    
It is *not* public domain.  It's copyrighted (per my Debian distro's
r-base copyright file), and contains the following copyright notices:

    Copyright (c) 1984 to 1992 Adobe Systems Incorporated.
    Copyright 1999 by (URW)++ Design & Development
    Copyright (C), 1998 Thomas Baier
    Copyright (C), 1998-2000, Thomas Baier, R Core Development Team
    Copyright (C) 1998 John W. Emerson
    Copyright (C) various dates W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley
    Copyright (c) 1989, 1992 by AT&T.
    Copyright (C) 1998 W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley
    Copyright (C) 1997-1999	 Adrian Trapletti
    Copyright (C) 1999 Martyn Plummer
    Copyright (c) 1993 Alan Richardson
    Copyright (C) 1998-1999	  Lyndon Drake
    Copyright (C) 1997, 1999 Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura.

There is one reference to "public domain" in a Knuth Marsienne
implmentation, though it's a conditioned PD grant (e.g.:
self-contradictory).

What R is, properly, is a FSF Free Software / OSI Open Source
project released under (mostly) the GNU GPL.

 
> It's reasonably good now, but I probably will be adding to it during the
> next couple of weeks, as I have a research project which requires me to
> use some features I haven't used before.

One of my confusions is that I'm used to languages (SAS, awk, Perl,
Python) which largely act rowwise on data.  R can act on a row, a
column, on a frame, or on a more complex object, which hurts my brain.

A good intro to using R in emacs / xemacs would be useful as I think R
would benefit by the IDE environment emacsen make possible.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    Of course Ms DiDio, a friend and former co-worker of Darl McBride's, is
    deeply involved in SCO's Microsoft financed attack against Linux, so any
    paper on Linux she endorses should be disregarded out of hand.
    - Andrew Grygus
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