[R] What makes R different from other programming languages?

[Matthias Gondan]

My vote:

1. Symbolic function arguments:

fn = function(a, b)
{
     a/b
}

fn(b=10, a=2)

2. Names for elements of a vector and matrices

v = c(a=1, b=2)
v['a'] = v['a'] * 2

same for matrices

3. about 10,000 user-contributed packages on CRAN

4. weird things like

a = numeric(10)
a[1:10] = 1:2
<no error message>
a
answer: five times 1:2

which guarantee happy debugging

5. and, of course, much built-in statistical stuff


Am 20.08.2012 20:02, schrieb johannes rara:
> My intention is to give a presentation about R programming language
> for software developers. I would like to ask, what are the things that
> make R different from other programming languages? What are the
> specific cases where Java/C#/Python developer might say "Wow, that was
> neat!"? What are the things that are easy in R, but very difficult in
> other programming languages (like Java)?
>
> Thanks,
> -J
>
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