ABSTRACT
R has its roots in a package developed by Richard Becker and John Chambers at Bell Labs in the 1970s through the 1990s known as S. e S language had several features that were revolutionary for the time: the storage of data in self-dening objects and the use of methods for those objects (Chambers 1999). A commercial version of S, S-plus, was introduced by Statistical Sciences Corporation in the 1990s and became very popular. Around the same time, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman developed R, an open source version of S based on the GNU license. Because R was written mostly in C with a few FORTRAN libraries, it was easily ported to various Unix systems, the Macintosh, and eventually Microso Windows.
