R help - Apr 2010 - R and S-Plus: Two programs separated by a common language?

Hello Everyone,
 
My company purchased S-Plus before it was bought out by Tibco. My understanding
is that we own version 7.0 outright.
 
So far, I've been learning in R but thought I might also try working in
S-Plus. My understanding is that S-Plus has some useful extra features. Another
potential benefit would be the ability to purchase technical support, which I
thought might help me to learn the S language.
 
I was just wondering if anyone could give me some advice about the wisdom or
folly of trying to use both products. For example, how well do the two play
together? If I learn to do something using a package in R, is their some way to
bring that into S-Plus? I've noticed that some R packages, such as MASS and
Hmisc are in S-Plus but are unsupported. Others, such as reshape, appear not to
be in the program but I thought maybe they could be imported.
 
I know that R and S-Plus code are supposed to be very similar. I was just
wondering how similar. Yesterday, I ran some code from the MASS package in
S-Plus but the program didn't produce the graph I exepected to see. I've
been able to use windows() in R to correct this, but S-Plus doesn't
recognize that. So I was wondering how often code written in one program would
fail to work in the other.
 
Any insights you can offer will be most appreciated.
 
Thanks,
 
Paul 
 


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Hi Paul,

Paul Miller wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
>  
> My company purchased S-Plus before it was bought out by Tibco. My
understanding is that we own version 7.0 outright.
>  
> So far, I've been learning in R but thought I might also try working in
S-Plus. My understanding is that S-Plus has some useful extra features.
Such as? Are these features so important for you work that you need
s-plus?
> Another potential benefit would be the ability to purchase technical
support, which I thought might help me to learn the S language.
>   
You can also get technical support for R, REvolution Computing for
example.
>  
> I was just wondering if anyone could give me some advice about the wisdom
or folly of trying to use both products. For example, how well do the two play
together? If I learn to do something using a package in R, is their some way to
bring that into S-Plus? I've noticed that some R packages, such as MASS and
Hmisc are in S-Plus but are unsupported. Others, such as reshape, appear not to
be in the program but I thought maybe they could be imported.
>   
I would say, if it is not necessary, use one product and not two. 
Problems like the one below can be avoided in that case.

cheers and good luck,
Paul
>  
> I know that R and S-Plus code are supposed to be very similar. I was just
wondering how similar. Yesterday, I ran some code from the MASS package in
S-Plus but the program didn't produce the graph I exepected to see. I've
been able to use windows() in R to correct this, but S-Plus doesn't
recognize that. So I was wondering how often code written in one program would
fail to work in the other.
>  
> Any insights you can offer will be most appreciated.
>  
> Thanks,
>  
> Paul 
>  
>
>
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>
>   
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>
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>   

-- 
Drs. Paul Hiemstra
Department of Physical Geography
Faculty of Geosciences
University of Utrecht
Heidelberglaan 2
P.O. Box 80.115
3508 TC Utrecht
Phone:  +3130 274 3113 Mon-Tue
Phone:  +3130 253 5773 Wed-Fri
http://intamap.geo.uu.nl/~paul
http://nl.linkedin.com/pub/paul-hiemstra/20/30b/770

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:00:13 -0700 (PDT), Paul Miller
<pjmiller_57 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>I was just wondering if anyone could give me some advice about the wisdom or
folly of trying to use both [R and S-Plus].
I suspect that trying to use both will give you heartburn. When I
switched from S-Plus to R, the most significant differences (for my
purposes) were in graphics. The languages differ in the way they
approach graphics, and even where the languages appear the same,
interpretation of some parameters (such as cex) can be different. 

Also, the way data are stored differs considerably. Because S-Plus
stores data on disk, while R keeps data in memory, S-Plus can have an
edge when analyzing huge data sets. (That reflects my understanding of
the situation about 5 or 6 yr ago.) 

I have gone back to old projects and tried to execute my S-Plus code
in R. In general, the code needed minor to major massaging to make
that happen, especially when the output was carefully annotated
graphs.

I would recommend that you concentrate on R, where much active
development is taking place.  Support from this newsgroup is better
than support from most commercial vendors, though perhaps not always
as sweet-natured.  As noted by others, Revolution R is available with
commercial support, if you need it.