R and the R environment

R is a language and an environment that is primarily used for statistical computing and related graphic creation. It is similar to and based on the S language and environment, which is developed at Bell Laboratories and can be considered as a different implementation of S.

R provides a wide variety of statistical techniques such as linear and nonlinear modeling, classic statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, and clustering. It also includes graphical techniques. Because of its focus on statistical techniques, it works well as a tool for implementing Analytic Executables (AEs).

R is freely available under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on Windows, MacOS, and a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems, including FreeBSD and Linux. Because of the public nature of the code and the ability for outside parties to develop packages, R is highly extensible. For a detailed description of the packages, see R Packages and CRAN.

Note: Downloading, installing, and working with open source R and all other necessary packages is subject to the terms and conditions that are mentioned in the appropriate license files of those packages.