R (programming language)

R

Appeared in	August 1993 (1993-08)
Designed by	Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (statistician)
Developer	R Core Team
Stable release	4.0.2 ("Taking Off Again") / June 22, 2020 (2020-06-22)
Influenced by	Common Lisp Scheme XLispStat
Influenced	Julia
License	GNU GPL v2
Usual filename extensions	.r .rdata .rds .rda
Website	{{#property:P856}}
R Programming at Wikibooks

R is a programming language and free software environment for statistics. R is a language built for a specific purpose. It is strictly designed for statistical analysis. The algorithms for many statistical models are devised in R. Precisely R is the language of Statistical Analyzers. It’s an open source and the best suite for the statisticians to develop statistical softwares. R is putting utmost efforts to walk parallelly to Python.

Usage in other areas

The R language was originally made for statistics. But today, it is also used in many scientific fields including ecology.

Development history

A list of changes in R releases is maintained in various "news" files at CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network). Some highlights are listed below for several major releases.

Release	Date	Description
0.16		This is the last test version.
0.49	1997-04-23	This is the oldest source release which is currently available on CRAN. CRAN is started on this date, with 3 mirrors that initially hosted 12 packages.
0.60	1997-12-05	R becomes an official part of the GNU Project. The code is hosted and maintained on CVS.
0.65.1	1999-10-07	First versions of update.packages and install.packages functions for downloading and installing packages from CRAN.
1.0	2000-02-29	The developers declared that it is stable enough for production use.
1.4	2001-12-19	S4 methods are introduced and the first version for Mac OS X is made available soon after.
1.8	2003-10-08	Introduced a flexible condition handling mechanism for signalling and handling condition objects.
2.0	2004-10-04	Introduced fast loading of data with minimal expense of system memory.
2.1	2005-04-18	Support for UTF-8 encoding. They also started of internationalization and localization for different languages.
2.6.2	2008-02-08	Last version to support Windows 95, 98, Me and NT 4.0
2.11	2010-04-22	Support for Windows 64 bit systems.
2.12.2	2011-02-25	Last version to support Windows 2000
2.13	2011-04-14	Adding a new compiler function that allows speeding up functions by converting them to byte-code.
2.14	2011-10-31	Added mandatory namespaces for packages. Added a new parallel package.
2.15	2012-03-30	New load balancing functions. Improved serialization speed for long vectors.
3.0.0	2013-04-03	Support for numeric index values 231 and larger on 64 bit systems.
3.3.3	2017-03-06	Last version to support Microsoft Windows XP.
3.4.0	2017-04-21	Just-in-time compilation (JIT) of functions and loops to byte-code enabled by default.
3.5.0	2018-04-23	Packages byte-compiled on installation by default. Compact internal representation of integer sequences. Added a new serialization format to support compact internal representations.
3.6.0	2019-04-26
4.0.0	2020-04-24

Communities

R has local communities worldwide for users to share ideas and learn.

There are a growing number of R events bringing its users together, such as conferences (e.g. useR!, WhyR?, conectaR, SatRdays) and other meetups.

useR! conferences

The official annual gathering of R users is called "useR!". The first such event was useR! 2004 in May 2004, Vienna, Austria. After skipping 2005, the useR! conference has been held annually. Subsequent conferences have included:

• useR! 2006, Vienna, Austria
• useR! 2007, Ames, Iowa, USA
• useR! 2008, Dortmund, Germany
• useR! 2009, Rennes, France
• useR! 2010, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
• useR! 2011, Coventry, United Kingdom
• useR! 2012, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
• useR! 2013, Albacete, Spain
• useR! 2014, Los Angeles, California, USA
• useR! 2015, Aalborg, Denmark
• useR! 2016, Stanford, California, USA
• useR! 2017, Brussels, Belgium
• useR! 2018, Brisbane, Australia
• useR! 2019, Toulouse, France

Future conferences planned are as follows:

• useR! 2020, St. Louis, Missouri, USA (Canceled)
• useR! 2021, Zurich, Switzerland

The R Journal

The R Journal is the open access refereed journal of the R project. It features articles on the use and development of the R language.

Basic syntax

The following examples illustrate the basic syntax of the language and use of the command-line interface.

In R, the generally preferred assignment operator is an arrow made from two characters <-. Although = can be used instead.

> x <- 1:6  # Create vector.
> y <- x^2  # Create vector by formula.
> print(y)  # Print the vector’s contents.
[1]  1  4  9 16 25 36

> mean(y)  # Arithmetic mean of vector.
[1] 15.16667

> var(y)  # Sample variance of vector.
[1] 178.9667

> model <- lm(y ~ x)  # Linear regression model y = A + B * x.
> print(model)  # Print the model’s results.

Call:
lm(formula = y ~ x)

Coefficients:
(Intercept)            x 
     -9.333        7.000

> summary(model)  # Display an in-depth summary of the model.

Call:
lm(formula = y ~ x)

Residuals:
      1       2       3       4       5       6
 3.3333 -0.6667 -2.6667 -2.6667 -0.6667  3.3333

Coefficients:
            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)   
(Intercept)  -9.3333     2.8441  -3.282 0.030453 * 
x             7.0000     0.7303   9.585 0.000662 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 3.055 on 4 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.9583, Adjusted R-squared:  0.9478
F-statistic: 91.88 on 1 and 4 DF,  p-value: 0.000662

> par(mfrow = c(2, 2))  # Create a 2 by 2 layout for figures.
> plot(model)  # Output diagnostic plots of the model.