S (programming language)

S is a statistical programming language that was originally developed by John M. Chambers, Rick Becker and Allan Wilks at Bell Laboratories. The goal of the language was the words of John Chambers after is to turn ideas into software quickly and accurately sense ( "to turn ideas into software, Quickly and faithfully ").

Today, the two S- R and S-Plus implementations are available, which are substantially, but not completely compatible. The R- implementation is in TIOBE Index (February 2012) at No. 20, S -Plus and generic S are listed among the 100 most widely used programming languages.

History

Old S

In 1969, Chambers published an outline of a statistical language. At that time it was still necessary to directly visit Fortran routines for statistical calculations in the rule.

The first S- implementation ( S1) was born 1975-1976, objectives of time on Honeywell mainframe computers under the operating system running GCOS language were particularly flexibility and programmability.

First licenses were awarded for the next version, S2 ( 1980). The language is now also supported Unix machines.

New S

By introducing S3 in 1988 fundamental changes in its syntax and S have been introduced. Among other things, the new version now the first time allowed the formulation of statistical models. A commercial branch ( S -Plus) was born.

In 1992, the first free version of S was released with R. R is available for different platforms (Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and Windows).

S4

S4 introduced in 1998 a new, significantly extended object and class model. This was taken over in 2000 by R.

The development of R has been heavily promoted by the formation of the R Development Core Team (1997) and the establishment of the R Foundation ( 2002).

Today, two implementations of the S language are available: The commercial version of S-Plus the vendor TIBCO and the free statistical environment R, a GNU project. The majority of the programs that were written for S -Plus, are run and vice versa, even under R. Differences exist, particularly in the implementation of complex graphics.