R Programming

Facts about letter R

R is the 18th letter of the English alphabet. The letter R is the eighth most common letter in English and the fourth-most common consonant.

Developer’s R

R is a free software and programming language developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. R can be considered as the implementation of the S language which was developed in the 1980s. R can be regarded as an integrated environment that facilitates data manipulation, calculations and graphical display of the data. It is mainly used for statistical computations. The source code of R is maintained now by the RDevelopment Core Team. The functionality of R can be extended by adding R packages. The latest version of R is version 3.2.0 which was released on April 16, 2015. It is also used by some technology majors like Google and Facebook.

R is a powerful statistical programming language. It is derived from the S language which was developed by Bell Labs. R can work in all major Operating Systems including Windows, Linux and MacOS. The code and data in R can be distributed as packages. It supports both object oriented and functional programming methodologies. R programs require less debugging time because the lines of code are less. R is an interpreted language. All the computations are carried out in the main memory and hence R has limitations in dealing with large datasets. This can be easily tackled by using the database interfaces available with R.

Features of R

• Open Source software: R is freely available under the GNU GPL. The source code of R is primarily written in C and FORTRAN.
• Designed for data analysis: It consists of a vast collection of algorithms for data retrieval, processing and analysis. Dimensionality Reduction, Frequent Pattern Mining, Sequence Mining, Clustering and Classification are some of the algorithms implemented in R.
• Variety and quality of graphics: R offers a variety of graphical functions such as bar plots, pie charts, histograms, time series, dot charts, image plots, 3D surfaces, scatter plots, maps etc.
• Object Oriented: R consist of three types of object oriented features i.e. S3, S4 and R5.
• Community Support: Vast community support of more than 2 million users.
• Platform independence: R is available for all platforms.

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