ABSTRACT
The R system for statistical computing is an environment for data analysis and graphics. The root of R is the S language, developed by John Chambers and colleagues (Becker et al., 1988, Chambers and Hastie, 1992, Chambers, 1998) at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now owned by Lucent Technologies) starting in the 1960ies. The S language was designed and developed as a programming language for data analysis tasks but in fact it is a full-featured programming language in its current implementations.
