Phil Henshaw wrote:
> I can only
> limp along with my live systems data analysis using home made lisp
> routines on a graphics platform because of the standard grid model of
> data that seems to be used elsewhere?
[..]
> marvelous! but now I've got all sorts of stuff to transfer to a
> system I don't understand... know any tutors in NY?
If you like Lisp, you'll find R natural. Witness lambda expressions
and lexical scope:
test <- function (l) {
sum(sapply (l, function (x) { x + l }))
}
> test (c(1,2,3,4))
[1] 80
It's also has consed lists (called pair lists), hash tables (called
environments), etc.
There are tutorials of various sorts on the R website.
R is a great package. It has a plug-in interface for native code, and
hundreds of contributed packages.
Folks that are mainly interested in presentation graphics or
visualization might not find it is what they want as that's not it's
greatest strength. It's greatest strength is that it is good
full-fledged dynamially typed programming language with about every
statistical test ever conceived. But visualization is improving.
There's a very usable OpenGL package that works fine, for example. Also
some will gripe that it is slow. It's true there is no compiler for R,
yet, but given the native code plug-in interface and the fact that most
operations are vectorized with intensive numerics done in R's native
code libraries, I think that's a pretty bogus complaint.
Marcus
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