[R] Starting with R

[Peter Dalgaard]

Anne G <anne at wjh.harvard.edu> writes:

> I am studying R and within the first 3 lines of
> demo("graphics") I get completely stuck.
> 
> could you 1. give me the answer so I can move on 2. tell me
> how I might find the answer.

Well, y'know, sometimes obstacles are more easily handled by walking
around them than by climbing over them. Who said you need to
understand demo("graphics") in order to get to know R? It's a demo, a
show-off of what glitzy graphics we can do, not a tutorial. Actually,
it might be sensible to walk through some of its examples, but the
first couple of setup lines can certainly be skipped.
 
> On my mac OSX, the first command is equivalent to
> get("quartz")()
> 
> now get("quartz") would be a regular function format
> but what is get () ()? what kind of beast? does get() return
> a function?

In this case, yes, exactly. In general, get() returns the R object of
the given name, which may or may not be a funtion.

> I run demo("graphics") and of course I want to stop it right
> away, without running through the whole demo, how do I STOP
> IT! CANCEL IT? (it gets stuck on hit return to continue
> lines)

This is OS and GUI dependent. On unix text terminals you can generally
hit Ctrl-C, in the Windows GUI there's a Stop button (I think), and
Aqua seems to have an Abort button.

> Then I want to look at the program that generated
> demo("graphics") and I find a graphic file, but no demo fx.
> where is the demo("graphics") fx physically on my computer?
> how do I find it on a Mac?

Somewhere in the R installation directory. 

system.file("demo/graphics.R",package="graphics")

should tell you exactly, on all systems.


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907