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

[chris]

too many solutions to the problem. oh, its so overwhelming.


On Sun, 2009-02-22 at 11:22 -0800, Norm Matloff wrote:
> 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
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-- 
chris <teknopup at gmail.com>
http://digitalatoll.flnet.org/