[R] software comparison

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2007, Philippe Grosjean wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I just read this paper, and was surprised by:
>
> "This study performs a comparison of the latest versions of nine
> different statistical software packages using StRD. These packages are
> SAS (9.1), SPSS (12.0), Excel (2003), Minitab (14.0), Stata (8.1), Splus
> (6.2), R (1.9.1), JMP (5.0), and StatCrunch (3.0)."
>
> For a paper published in 2007, and submitted in April 2005, this is
> still surprising. If I my calculation is correct, in 2004, they would
> have used R 2.2.x, or something,... not 1.9.1?

No -- there is a new x.y.0 twice per year. Checking the r-announce 
archives shows that 2.0.0 came out in October 2004 and 1.9.1 in June 2004.

Describing 1.9.1 as "the latest version" was inaccurate, but it may well 
have been a more recent version than for most of the  other packages they 
examined.

 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle