Harvard Mathematics Department : Computing: R

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. The language R is installed on abel. For MacOSX and Windows, get it here.

For an introduction, start here. On Unix (Solaris, Linux or OS 10) R is started in a terminal with

You quit the program with

q()

at the R command line prompt. As usual, the command line interface (CLI) is more powerful and flexible then the graphical user interface (GUI). A good start is to type

demo()

after starting up R. For example, to see some graphics demos, type

demo()

Here is a trivial sample sessions, which generates a normal distributed data sets, prints statistical properties and plots some data points.

x <- rnorm(50)
summary(x)
plot(x)
q()

Simplicity, Clarity, Generality B.W. Kernighan, R. Pike, in "The Practice of Programming".