Omegahat Packages for R
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News The Newsletter of the R Project Volume 1/1, January 2001 Editorial by Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch As all of R, R News is a volunteer project. The editorial board currently consists of the R core devel- Welcome to the first volume of R News, the newslet- opment team plus Bill Venables. We are very happy ter of the R project for statistical computing. R News that Bill—one of the authorities on programming the will feature short to medium length articles covering S language—has offered himself as editor of “Pro- topics that might be of interest to users or developers grammer’s Niche”, a regular column on R/S pro- of R, including gramming. This first volume already features a broad range Changes in R: new features of the latest release • of different articles, both from R core members and other developers in the R community (without Changes on CRAN: new add-on packages, • whom R would never have grown to what it is now). manuals, binary distributions, mirrors, . The success of R News critically depends on the ar- Add-on packages: short introductions to or re- ticles in it, hence we want to ask all of you to sub- • views of R extension packages mit to R News. There is no formal reviewing pro- cess yet, however articles will be reviewed by the ed- Programmer’s Niche: nifty hints for program- itorial board to ensure the quality of the newsletter. • ming in R (or S) Submissions should simply be sent to the editors by email, see the article on page 30 for details on how to Applications: Examples of analyzing data with • write articles. R We really hope you will enjoy reading R News! The newsletter as a medium for communication intends to fill the gap between the R mailing lists and Kurt Hornik scientific journals: Compared with emails it is more Technische Universität Wien, Austria persistent, one can cite articles in the newsletter and [email protected] because the newsletter is edited it has better quality control. On the other hand, when compared to scien- Friedrich Leisch tific journals, it is faster, less formal, and last but not Technische Universität Wien, Austria least focused on R. [email protected] Contents of this issue: The density of the non-central chi-squared dis- tribution for large values of the noncentrality parameter . 14 Editorial . 1 Connections . 16 What is R? . 2 Using Databases with R . 18 R Resources . 3 Rcgi 4: Making Web Statistics Even Easier . 20 Changes in R . 4 Omegahat Packages for R . 21 Changes on CRAN . 8 Using XML for Statistics: The XML Package . 24 Under New Memory Management . 10 Programmer’s Niche . 27 On Exact Rank Tests in R . 11 Writing Articles for R News . 30 Porting R to the Macintosh . 13 Upcoming Events . 32 Vol. 1/1, January 2001 2 What is R? A combined version of the files README and Present status THANKS from the R source tree. The present version implements most of the func- by the R Core Team tionality in the 1988 book “The New S Language” (the “Blue Book”) and many of the applications. In addi- tion, we have implemented a large part of the func- Introduction tionality from the 1992 book “Statistical Models in S” (the “White Book”). R is “GNU S” — A language and environment for All the R functions have been documented in statistical computing and graphics. R is similar to the form of help pages in an “output independent” the award-winning S system, which was developed form which can be used to create versions for HTML, at Bell Laboratories by John Chambers et al. It pro- LAT X, text etc. An 800+ page Reference Index (a col- vides a wide variety of statistical and graphical tech- E lection of all the help pages) can be obtained in a va- niques. R is free software distributed under a GNU- riety of formats. The document “An Introduction to style copyleft. R” provides a more user-friendly starting point, and The core of R is an interpreted computer language there is an “R Language Definition” manual and more with a syntax superficially similar to C, but which is specialized manuals on data import/export and ex- actually a “functional programming language” with tending R. See the file ‘INSTALL’ in the R sources for capabilities similar to Scheme. The language allows instructions on how to generate these documents. branching and looping as well as modular program- ming using functions. Most of the user-visible func- tions in R are written in R, calling upon a smaller set of internal primitives. It is possible for the user to in- Goals terface to procedures written in C, C++ or FORTRAN languages for efficiency, and also to write additional Our aim at the start of this project was to demon- primitives. strate that it was possible to produce an S-like en- The R distribution contains functionality for a vironment which did not suffer from the memory- large number of statistical procedures. Among these demands and performance problems which S has. are: linear and generalized linear models, nonlin- Somewhat later, we started to turn R into a “real” ear regression models, time series analysis, classical system, but unfortunately we lost a large part of the parametric and nonparametric tests, clustering and efficiency advantage in the process, so have recently smoothing. There is also a large set of functions revised the memory management mechanism and which provide a flexible graphical environment for are looking for other candidates for optimization. creating various kinds of data presentations. Longer-term goals include to explore new ideas: A package specification allows the production of e.g., virtual objects and component-based program- loadable modules for specific purposes, and several ming, and expanding the scope of existing ones like contributed packages are made available through the formula-based interfaces. Further, we wish to get a “R Resources” CRAN sites (see the article on in this is- handle on a general approach to graphical user in- sue). terfaces (preferably with cross-platform portability), and to develop better 3-D and dynamic graphics. History R was initially written by Robert Gentleman and Thanks Ross Ihaka of the Statistics Department of the Uni- versity of Auckland. In addition, a large group of in- R would not be what it is today without the invalu- dividuals has contributed to R by sending code and able help of these people, who contributed by donat- bug reports. ing code, bug fixes and documentation: Since mid-1997 there has been a core group who can modify the R source code CVS archive. The Valerio Aimale, Thomas Baier, Ben Bol- group currently consists of ker, Göran Broström, Saikat DebRoy, Douglas Bates, John Chambers, Pe- Lyndon Drake, Paul Gilbert, Robert ter Dalgaard, Robert Gentleman, Kurt King, Kjetil Kjernsmo, Philippe Lambert, Hornik, Ross Ihaka, Friedrich Leisch, Jim Lindsey, Patrick Lindsey, Catherine Thomas Lumley, Martin Maechler, Guido Loader, Gordon Maclean, John Maindon- Masarotto, Paul Murrell, Brian Ripley, ald, Duncan Murdoch, Jens Oehlschlägel- Duncan Temple Lang and Luke Tierney. Akiyoshi, Steve Oncley, Richard O’Keefe, R News ISSN 1609-3631 Vol. 1/1, January 2001 3 Hubert Palme, Jose C. Pinheiro, Mar- If we have overlooked you, please let us know and tyn Plummer, Jonathan Rougier, Heiner we’ll update the list. Many more, too numerous to Schwarte, Bill Simpson, Adrian Trapletti, mention here, have contributed by sending bug re- Terry Therneau, Bill Venables, Gregory R. ports and suggesting various improvements. Warnes and Andreas Weingessel. A special debt is owed to John Chambers who has graciously contributed advice and encouragement in We have probably omitted some important the early days of R and later became a member of the names here because of incomplete record keeping. core team. R Resources by the R Core Team [email protected]: general inquiries and discussion about R. Frequently Asked Questions [email protected]: discussions about the future of R and pre- A collection of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) testing of new versions. and their answers is maintained by Kurt Hornik and can be found at the URL http://www.ci.tuwien. To subscribe (or unsubscribe) to these mailing list ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html. send ‘subscribe’ (or ‘unsubscribe’) in the body of A text version is in file ‘FAQ’ in the top direc- the message (not in the subject!) to tory of the R sources, and an HTML version is avail- able via the on-line help (on the index page given by [email protected] help.start()). [email protected] [email protected] Archives Browsable archives of the mailing lists can be The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is a found at http://www.r-project.org/. Text files (in collection of sites which carry identical material, con- Unix mail folder format) of the archives are made sisting of the R distribution(s), the contributed exten- available monthly; see the ‘doc/mail/mail.html’ file on sions, documentation for R, and binaries. any CRAN node. The CRAN master site (in Vienna, Austria) can be found at the URLs Bug-tracking System http://cran.r-project.org/ R has a bug-tracking system (or perhaps a bug-filing ftp://cran.r-project.org/pub/R/ system is a more precise description) available on the net at and is mirrored daily at many sites: see the list at http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html.