[R] Reasons to Use R

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 4/8/07, Johann Hibschman <johannh at gmail.com> wrote:
> R's pass-by-value semantics also make it harder than it should be to
> deal with where it's crucial that you not make a copy of the data
> frame, for fear of running out of memory.  Pass-by-reference would
> make implementing data transformations so much easier that I don't
> really understand how pass-by-value became the standard.  (If there's
> a trick to doing in-place transformations, I've not found it.)

Because R processes objects in memory I also would not rate it as
as strong as some other packages on very large data sets but you can
use databases which may make it less important in some cases and you
can get a certain amount of mileage out of R environments and as
64 bit computers become commonplace and memory sizes grow
larger and larger data sets will become easy to handle.

Regarding environments, also available are proto objects from the
proto package which are environments with slightly different semantics.
Even if you don't intend to use the proto package its got quite a bit
of documentation and supporting information that might be
helpful:

- home page:
  http://code.google.com/p/r-proto/
- overview (click on Wiki tab at home page) which includes article links
  that discuss OO and environments
- tutorial, reference card, reference manual, vignette (see Links box)