Introduction to R Programming Language, History of R, Features of R, Advantages of R.

Introduction to R Programming Language

R is an open source software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R compiles and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and numerous UNIX platforms such as Linux. R software project by first started by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka. It has a worldwide repository system, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) - http://cran.r-project.org for user-contributed add-on packages to supplement the base distribution. R is much more than just its core language. R is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac. 

As stated earlier, R is a programming language and software environment for statistical analysis, graphics representation, and reporting.

R (Programming Language)

History of R

1. R is an implementation of the S programming language with lexical scoping semantics inspired by a scheme.

2. S was created by John Chamber while at Bell Labs. 

Features of R

These are the following most important of R:

1. A console for issuing commands.

2. R is a well developed, simple and effective programming language which includes conditionals; loops; user defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.

3. R has an effective data handling and storage facility.

4. R provides a suite of operators for calculation on arrays, lists, vectors, and matrices.

5. R provides a large, coherent and integrated collection of tools for data analysis.

6. R provides graphical facilities for data analysis and display either directly at the computer or printing at the papers.

Advantages of R

1. It is the most comprehensive statistical analysis package available

2. It is free and open source software, allowing anyone to use.

3. R is licensed under GNU (General Public Licence) with copyright held by the R foundation for statistical computing.

4. It is cross-platform.

5. R runs on many operating systems and different hardware.