Is there anything R can do that Splus can't? I know about the differences in the language but what about statistical functionality. Are there models you can build or graphs you can plot in R that you can't in Splus? My impression is that in this respect R is strictly a subset. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
>Is there anything R can do that Splus can't?Problems which require lots of looping and cannot be re-coded as vector/matrix operations are theoretically possible but practically infeasible in S, unless they are coded in C or Fortran and called from S. These problems seem to run fine in R. Paul Gilbert -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
On 30 Nov 1998, Ed Kademan wrote:> Is there anything R can do that Splus can't? I know about the > differences in the language but what about statistical functionality. > Are there models you can build or graphs you can plot in R that you > can't in Splus? My impression is that in this respect R is strictly a > subset.Since almost anything you can do in R has source code that you could port to S-PLUS with little effort there will never be much you can do in R that you couldn't do in S-PLUS (or vanilla S) if you wanted to. Some of the packages, because they are more recent than similar S(-PLUS) built-in features may be better designed (eg the tree packages from Terry Therneau and Brian Ripley, the best-subsets regression code from Alan Miller) but these could be loaded into S-PLUS if you felt the urge. There's the occasional little feature: eg pt() allows a non-centrality parameter for the t-distribution, but again, since the code is freely available you could dyn.load() it into S-PLUS quite easily. The graphics functionality is better in some ways: mathematical annotation of plots, better control of colors in plotting functions than in Unix S-PLUS. As R is much faster on _some_ code than S-PLUS I have also done simulations in R that I could not do in S-PLUS. Whether this counts as an added feature is arguable, but it can certainly be useful. Thomas Lumley Assistant Professor, Biostatistics University of Washington, Seattle -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
One of the R pluses *is* in the graphics, IMO. 1) It allows Mathematical Text !!! Try example(text) Unfortunately, this is still mostly undocumented. However, Paul Murrell & Ross Ihaka have a paper submitted which describes it. A bit (:-) exaggerated, `Basically, R has TeX inside' [this is me, not the above authors..]. 2) It allows you to specify line types `very detailed' => ?par has lty: The line type. Line types can either be specified as an integer (1=solid, 2=dashed, 3=dotted 4=dot- dashed) or as one of the character strings `"solid"', `"dashed"', `"dotted"' or `"dot- dashed"'. Alternatively, a string of up to 8 characters may be given, giving the length (in points) of line segments which are alternatively drawn and skipped. For example, `"44"' is dashed and `"13"' is dotted. 3) You can more easily specify colors and color palettes. plot(x,y, col = "purple") => ?colors ?palette ?rainbow par(ask = T) example(palettes) 4) You have more par()'s to specify the color and other things of main,sub, [xy]lab, .., separately. ==> ?par 5) There's gamma correction for color. 6) You can set or fix the aspect ratio of plots quite generally `` par(asp = ..) ''. This makes V&R "eqscplot" unnecessary and allows much more; further, it allows manual rescaling of the plot and keeps the aspect ratio. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._