Hi, I'm a beginner of R. I find it absoluty fantastic, flexible and very extensible. For the moment only a curiosity.. Why the name R? (are they perhaps the initials of Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka?, or is the name correlated with S language?) Sorry for my poor question but I am very curious Thank in advance Paolo C. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- 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 _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
If you're curious, you should read the brief history in Ihaka, R. and Gentleman, R. (1996) "R: A language for data analysis and graphics." Journal of Computational Graphics and Statistics, 5 (3) 299-314. It's very interersting! -roger _______________________________ UCLA Department of Statistics rpeng at stat.ucla.edu http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~rpeng On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Paolo Covelli wrote:> Hi, > > I'm a beginner of R. > I find it absoluty fantastic, flexible and very extensible. > For the moment only a curiosity.. Why the name R? (are they perhaps the > initials of Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka?, or is the name correlated with > S language?) > Sorry for my poor question but I am very curious > > Thank in advance > Paolo C. > > -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- > 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 > _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._ >-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- 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 _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
"Paolo Covelli" <pcovelli at tin.it> writes:> Hi, > > I'm a beginner of R. > I find it absoluty fantastic, flexible and very extensible. > For the moment only a curiosity.. Why the name R? (are they perhaps the > initials of Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka?, or is the name correlated with > S language?) > Sorry for my poor question but I am very curiousThe precise reasoning is lost in the mists of time, but my upcoming book has this in the Preface, and people who might know better has had the chance to protest: "R owes its name to typical Internet humour. You may be familiar with the programming language C (whose name is a story in itself). Inspired by this, Becker and Chambers chose in the early 1980s to call their newly developed statistical programming language S. This language was further developed into the commercial product S-PLUS, which by the end of the decade was in widespread use among statisticians of all kinds. Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman from the University of Auckland, New Zealand chose to write a reduced version of S for teaching purposes, and what was more natural than choosing the immediately preceding letter? Ross' and Robert's initials may also have played a role." I might add that at least Robert has strongly objected to switching the name to "R-squared" (i.e., the product of R. and R.) on the basis of its being "too cute". -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- 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 _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
In that case, I'd vote ++R if ever it came to that :) "Peter Dalgaard BSA" wrote: I might add that at least Robert has strongly objected to switching the name to "R-squared" (i.e., the product of R. and R.) on the basis of its being "too cute". -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- 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 _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._