R is a programming language and software environment that has been designed for statistical graphics and computing. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.
What's New in This Release:
NEW FEATURES:
· lgamma(x) for very small x (in the denormalized range) is no longer Inf with a warning.
· image() now sorts an unsorted breaks vector, with a warning.
· The internal methods for tar() and untar() do a slightly more ngeneral job for 'ustar'-style handling of paths of more than 100 bytes.
· Packages compiler and parallel have been added to the reference
· index (refman.pdf).
· untar(tar = "internal") has some support for pax headers as produced by e.g. gnutar --posix (which seems prevalent on OpenSUSE 12.2) or bsdtar --format pax, including long path and link names.
· sQuote() and dQuote() now handle 0-length inputs.
· summaryRprof() returns zero-row data frames rather than throw an error if no events are recorded, for consistency.
· The included version of PCRE has been updated to 8.32.
· The tcltk namespace can now be re-loaded after unloading.
· The Tcl/Tk event loop is inhibited in a forked child from package parallel (as in e.g. mclapply()). parallel::makeCluster() recognizes the valu...