R help - Oct 2006 - The old question: R vs MATLAB vs Mathematica vs ...

Hi,

This question seems to be old, however I am asking it from a different point 
of view.

R introduces itself as a 'statistical' language and environment. There
are
many discussions about comparing R to MATLAB or mathematica (or other 
similar software). It seems to me that these other software have a broader 
range of applications. For example, in Mathematica one can solve a partial 
differential equation numberically or do image processing, or, one can 
connect a data acquisition card to MATLAB to acquire data from a measurement 
and analyse the results.

- Does R already provide such facilities?

- Was R design to be merely a statistical tool or was it designed with an 
idea of a general mathematical tool in mind?

- If the answer to the above is no, can R already be extended to include the 
missing features simply by extra packages or does it need some rational 
changes to support these features?

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Ali - <saveez <at> hotmail.com> writes:
> R introduces itself as a 'statistical' language and environment.
There are
> many discussions about comparing R to MATLAB or mathematica (or other 
> similar software). It seems to me that these other software have a broader 
> range of applications. For example, in Mathematica one can solve a partial 
> differential equation numberically or do image processing, or, one can 
> connect a data acquisition card to MATLAB to acquire data from a
measurement
> and analyse the results.
> 
> - Does R already provide such facilities?
some ...

RSiteSearch("image analysis")
http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/69200.html
  
RSiteSearch("PDE") -- suggests not much in the way
of numeric PDE solutions

RSiteSearch("data acquisition") -- suggests not much (but see
http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/81317.html )

> - Was R design to be merely a statistical tool or was it designed with an 
> idea of a general mathematical tool in mind?
  It was designed as a "language and environment for statistical computing
and
graphics".  However, since it provides interfaces to routines written
in other languages (Tcl/Tk, C, Fortran, ...) and other programs
(databases, GIS, etc.), it can do lots of other things.
> - If the answer to the above is no, can R already be extended to include
the
> missing features simply by extra packages 
  yes.

or does it need some rational 
[???]
> changes to support these features?
   no.

   You should think about why you want to extend R in these
ways.  If you already have access to Mathematica/MATLAB and
are happy with their capabilities, you should just use them.
Perhaps you can't afford them; are there other free/open
tools that do what you want?  If so, you should think about
using them, or perhaps writing interfaces between them and
R.

  cheers
    Ben Bolker