[R] R-0.64.2 vs Spls 5.0

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 18:40:16 +0200 (MET DST)
> From: Agustin Lobo <alobo at ija.csic.es>
> 
> Dear R makers and users:
> 
> After reading the FAQ and the comments on the
> comparison between R and S, I still have an important
> (at least for me) question: How is R compared
> to the new version of Splus 5.0  (for unix including Linux)?

The current version of S-PLUS for Unix/Linux is 5.1. This is
not being pedantic: its memory management is much better than 5.0.
It is likely that 5.1 has not yet reached European distributors,
but it is imminent.

> I must pay particular atention to the efficiency
> with large datasets and, more generally speaking,
> to the efficiency with memory management.
> I use Splus since version 3.x (on Unix) and now
> use Splus 4.5 for Windows (which gives me tons
> of memory problems). I'm considering whether
> going on with Splus and get Splus 5.0 for Linux
> or switch to R or to X-ploRe. 
> 
> I normally use Splus to process (large)
> datasets retrieved from multi-spectral remotely-sensed
> imagery.

I would say this has much more to do with programming well than the
choice between S-PLUS and R. I have happily processed time-series of
MRI images on my (192Mb RAM) laptop in all of S-PLUS 4.5, 5.1 and
pre-R-0.64.2.  These are large (ca 50Mb per dataset). What `well'
means differs between these systems.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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