The R programming language is a computer programming language and software environment for statistical computing. Statisticians and data miners widely use it to perform complex analysis.

History

R was first introduced in 1993. It was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand as an implementation of the S programming language. Like S, which was developed by John Chambers while he was at Bell Labs in the late 1970s, R was created to “turn ideas into software quickly and faithfully.”

Overview

R is an interpreted language, and its principle user interface is a command line. Native data structures of R include vectors, scalars, matrices, lists, and data frames, which are similar to a table in a relational database. R performs matrix arithmetic with a speed comparable to MATLAB.

R supports generic functions, which means a function performs the same general procedure, using different code depending on the data type.

Hello World in R

The following is “Hello World” written in R.

print(“Hello, World!”)

Programming language, Programming terms

  • Programming languages.
  • Programming language history.
  • How to create a computer program.
  • The R Project official website.
  • CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network.