[vox] [fwd] R (programming language) Bay Area Users Group

[Norm Matloff]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 10:55:22AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:

> There are R specific search engines, and it's pretty easy to find
> anything if you use cran instead of R (R's CPAN-alike is called CRAN)

Ironically, the single-letter nature of R's name makes it hard to Google
things.  And though there are indeed R-specific search engines, such as
http://www.rseek.org/ they are still of only limited usefulness.

CRAN is really huge, and one can get R code there for almost anything,
but again, it's often hard to find there.

The R documentation is also poor, in my opinion.

> > Also note it still requires a fortran compiler to compile.

> R itself is written primarily in R and C, but there are still
> important numerical methods which are written in Fortran which haven't
> been ported... but since R can call code in pretty much any language,
> this isn't much of a big deal. [And it's not like the GNU Fortran
> compiler isn't actively maintained anyway.]

I only recently encountered a situation in which I need gfortran to
compile something from CRAN.  And as to the base R package, it comes in
binaries for the major platforms (Ubuntu in my case), so FORTRAN is not
an issue.

I wasn't a big fan of R when I first started using it some years ago,
but now I find it indispensable, and in fact I'm writing a book on R
programming.  It's an excellent language for data manipulation and data
graphics.

I have an introduction to R at

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/R/RProg.pdf

Norm