R (programming language)

The R programming language is a GNU package[1] that is considered by its developers to be an implementation of the S programming language with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. It is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It was originally created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R Development Core Team. According to section 2.12 of the R FAQ^[1], "The name is partly based on the (first) names of the first two R authors (Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka), and partly a play on the name of the Bell Labs language 'S'". The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software.^{[2][unreliable source?][3]}

R is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis.^[4] R's source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems. R uses a command line interface, though several graphical user interfaces are available.