>I am interested in R as an alternative for a statistical tool 
>at our firm.
Ditto...

I have recently moved to this agency from a company where I had access to
Splus.  There is also a coworker here who had used Splus at a previous
employer.  We both would like some access to the S language.  We are
considering either begging loud and long to try to get the agency to
purchase two copies of Splus or trying to convert to R.  This is not an easy
decision under the circumstances and purchasing Splus will mean giving up
something else.  On the other hand I have never used R before and I fear the
learning curve for using R plus possibly ESS.

There are a few things I am trying to determine before I really decide what
to do.  I have been trying to convert some of my old Splus script files at
home to run under R 1.7.0.  Small (less than 50 lines or so) script files
that I have tested run exactly as before.  I tried to run one large
simulation and it took about a week of screaming hell to get the error
messages out (well all but one error message anyway).


1) I want a test suite for R.  I noted in the messages (Date: Mon Feb 24
2003 - 22:18:03 EST) that Prof Ripley wrote "Well, R itself has lots of
tests in its test suite (see directory tests in the sources) packages..."
but I was too stupid to find them.  
Q1: Can someone provide directions to this test suite that even an idiot can
follow?


2) Most of the problems I ran into had to do with missing values (in effect
I have ragged arrays).  One silly example is that I had made use of which.na
'which' apparently is not defined in R 1.7.0.  There are multiple
workarounds such as simply defining a function which.na but of course it
would be untested and you can loop back to 1).  The problem in my script
files is the same I had in Splus.  I want the defaults on all of the
functions (such as mean, median, etc.) I am using to be reset GLOBALLY so
that the default is to ignore missing values or not. 
Q2: Can the missing defaults be set globally for all functions.  In other
words, I want the default for how to treat NAs in all functions to be set at
startup.


3)  What I really want to do is pass a function name and extra arguments to
another function.  For example, in Splus, you can pass a function such as
median to the bootstrap function.  The bootstrap function says that you can
pass arguments to the median function through the bootstrap function but
unfortunately I could never make this work.  This functionality would
probably solve most of my NA problems if I could make it work.  (I don't
seem to be able to properly use the ellipses:)
Pseudo-Example: The Splus bootstrap can be called as
Bootstrap(variable-name, median, sampler=sample-function, na.rm=T)
But I never figured out how to pass the na.rm=T as an argument to median so
that the function being bootstrapped is median(variable-name, na.rm=T).
Q3: Is there some way in R to pass alternative arguments through a function
to another?

4)    Any general thoughts on Splus versus R that you are willing to share?


This is way too much blithering for one day but thanks in advance for any
thoughts.

Bob Baskin
All the usual disclaimers that my statements don't represent the agency etc.
etc.




-----Original Message-----
From: Marc Schwartz [mailto:mschwartz@medanalytics.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 1:19 PM
To: 'Fohr, Marc [AM]'; 'R-help@lists.R-project.org'
Subject: RE: [R] Introductory Resources

>-----Original Message-----
>From: r-help-bounces@stat.math.ethz.ch 
>[mailto:r-help-bounces@stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Fohr, Marc
[AM]
>Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 11:46 AM
>To: 'R-help@lists.R-project.org'
>Subject: [R] (no subject)
>
>
>Hello,
>
>I am interested in R as an alternative for a statistical tool 
>at our firm. I
>do know RATS an SPSS but not S+. As I read that R is close to 
>S+, I would
>like to know if you could recommend me any books as an 
>introduction to S+ or
>R.
>
>Best regards
>
>Marc


Marc,

Reviewing R FAQs 2.7 and 3.x on the main R site would be a good place
to start. The former lists books and other documents (some online)
that serve as excellent introductions, while the latter helps to
differentiate R and S/S+.

Spending some time with those references and the R FAQs will serve as
a good foundation, with keyword searches of the R-help list archive
serving as an additional strong resource.

HTH,

Another Marc

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