R Language

An interpreted free language with simple syntax and Tk bindings.

From the R Homepage (http://www.r-project.org/ ) "R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment that was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. 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 modeling, 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.

R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS."


RJM This language/environment is available as precompiled binary for several platforms. The console allows interactive creation of Tk Widgets. Handling Tk is quite easy but not "object oriented": Widgets are referenced as a first argument in functions, e.g.

  • tkcreate(c,"line", 20,90,300,00,fill="red",tags="lines")

Simple Tk examples are provided: http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/ The language itself seems to have a reasonable speed. Perhaps slightly faster than Tcl.


See also: