R (programming language)

**R** is a programming language and free software environment for statistics. R is a language built for a specific purpose. It is strictly designed for statistical analysis. The algorithms for many statistical models are devised in R. Precisely R is the language of Statistical Analyzers. It’s an open source and the best suite for the statisticians to develop statistical softwares.

## Usage in other areas

The R language was originally made for statistics. But today, it is also used in many scientific fields including ecology.

## Development history

A list of changes in R releases is maintained in various "news" files at CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network). Some highlights are listed below for several major releases.

|Release|Date|Description|
| --- | --- | --- |
||This is the last test version.||
|style="white-space:nowrap;"||This is the oldest source release which is currently available on CRAN. CRAN is started on this date, with 3 mirrors that initially hosted 12 packages.|
||R becomes an official part of the GNU Project. The code is hosted and maintained on CVS.||
|style="white-space:nowrap;"||First versions of update.packages and install.packages functions for downloading and installing packages from CRAN.|
||The developers declared that it is stable enough for production use.||
||S4 methods are introduced and the first version for Mac OS X is made available soon after.||
||Introduced a flexible condition handling mechanism for signalling and handling condition objects.||
||Introduced fast loading of data with minimal expense of system memory.||
||Support for UTF-8 encoding. They also started of internationalization and localization for different languages.||
||Last version to support Windows 95, 98, Me and NT 4.0||
||Support for Windows 64 bit systems.||
||Last version to support Windows 2000||
||Adding a new compiler function that allows speeding up functions by converting them to byte-code.||
||Added mandatory namespaces for packages. Added a new parallel package.||
||New load balancing functions. Improved serialization speed for long vectors.||
||Support for numeric index values 2<sup>31</sup> and larger on 64 bit systems.||
||Last version to support Microsoft Windows XP.||
||Just-in-time compilation (JIT) of functions and loops to byte-code enabled by default.||
||Packages byte-compiled on installation by default. Compact internal representation of integer sequences. Added a new serialization format to support compact internal representations.||

## Communities

R has local communities worldwide for users to share ideas and learn.

There are a growing number of R events bringing its users together, such as conferences (e.g. useR!, WhyR?, conectaR, SatRdays) and other meetups.

## useR! conferences

The official annual gathering of R users is called "useR!". The first such event was useR! 2004 in May 2004, Vienna, Austria.  After skipping 2005, the useR! conference has been held annually. Subsequent conferences have included:
- useR! 2006, Vienna, Austria
- useR! 2007, Ames, Iowa, USA
- useR! 2008, Dortmund, Germany
- useR! 2009, Rennes, France
- useR! 2010, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
- useR! 2011, Coventry, United Kingdom
- useR! 2012, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
- useR! 2013, Albacete, Spain
- useR! 2014, Los Angeles, California, USA
- useR! 2015, Aalborg, Denmark
- useR! 2016, Stanford, California, USA
- useR! 2017, Brussels, Belgium
- useR! 2018, Brisbane, Australia
- useR! 2019, Toulouse, France

Future conferences planned are as follows:
- useR! 2020, St. Louis, Missouri, USA (Canceled)
- useR! 2021, Zurich, Switzerland

## _The R Journal_

_The R Journal_ is the open access refereed journal of the R project. It features articles on the use and development of the R language.

## Basic syntax

The following examples illustrate the basic syntax of the language and use of the command-line interface.

In R, the generally preferred assignment operator is an arrow made from two characters `<-`. Although `=` can be used instead.

## Infobox (programming language)

- **name**: R
- **logo**: R logo.svg
- **screenshot**: R terminal.jpg
- **screenshot caption**: R terminal
- **designer**: Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (statistician)
- **developer**: R Core Team
- **influenced**: Julia (programming language), Julia
- **license**: GNU GPL#Version 2, GNU GPL v2
- **wikibooks**: R Programming
- **paradigms**: Multi-paradigm: Array programming, Object-oriented programming, object-oriented, Imperative programming, imperative, Functional programming, functional
- **latest release version**: (codename "")
- **influenced by**: * Common Lisp
* Scheme (programming language), Scheme
* XLispStat
* S (programming language), S