R Programming

The R language was primarily designed as a language for data manipulation, modelling and visualization, and many of the data structures reflect this view. However, R is itself a full-fledged programming language, with its own idioms – much like any other programming language. In some ways, R can be considered as a functional programming language, although it is not purely functional. R supports a form of lexical scope that provides a useful paradigm for encapsulating computations.

R is an implementation of the S language (Becker et al., 1988; Chambers and Hastie, 1992; Chambers, 1998). There is another commercial implementation available from Insightful Corporation, called S-PLUS. The two implementations are quite similar, and much of the material covered here can be used in either. However, many R-specific extensions are used in this monograph and users of R are our intended audience.