Paul Miller
2010-Apr-22 19:00 UTC
[R] 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 [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
Paul Hiemstra
2010-Apr-23 07:18 UTC
[R] R and S-Plus: Two programs separated by a common language?
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 > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >-- 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 intamap.geo.uu.nl/~paul nl.linkedin.com/pub/paul-hiemstra/20/30b/770
Mike Prager
2010-Apr-26 18:48 UTC
[R] R and S-Plus: Two programs separated by a common language?
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.