ABSTRACT
The combination of interactive computing and graphics in S language provides a powerful environment for understanding data. Plots can be used to look at data in a variety of ways and also to study the results of analyses, such as the fitting of models and various statistical summaries. Plots can be made using high-level plotting functions that produce an entire plot in one expression. Beyond this, graphical methods can be extensively revised, and new graphical methods constructed, by use of the S facilities for writing functions. S provides many high-level plotting functions, as well as facilities for adding to plots and controlling their appearance in detail. The device may be changed at any time during the S session by calling another device function. For making plots containing many points, either with points or with one of the high-level functions, a person may prefer a plotting dot to a character.
