Introduction

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R is a scripting language for statistical data manipulation and analysis. It was inspired by, and is mostly compatible with, the statistical language S developed by AT&T. The name S, for statistics, was an allusion to another programming language with a one-letter name developed at AT&T—the famous C language. S later was sold to a small firm, which added a graphical user interface (GUI) and named the result S-Plus.

R has become more popular than S or S-Plus, both because it’s free and because more people are contributing to it. R is sometimes called GNU S, to reflect its open source nature. (The GNU Project is a major collection of ...

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