[Rd] R's Identity

Abs Spurdle @purdle@@ @ending from gm@il@com
Wed Jul 18 03:40:46 CEST 2018


According to R's website, R should be cited as "R: A Language and
Environment for Statistical Computing".
According to the home page, "R is a free environment for statistical
computing and graphics".
I think the term "Language" is important and should be included.
But not everyone using R uses it for statistics or graphics.
Some people use it for numerical linear algebra, discrete mathematics,
computer algebra, differential equations, optimization or probability,
amongst other things.
So I think it would be better to say "R: A Language and Environment for
Mathematics and Statistics" or "R is a language and environment for
mathematics and statistics".
(I'm removing the word "Computing"),
I think changing R's identity to reflect mathematics more would make it
more appealing.

On a side issue, I think probability and statistics should be separated.
According to Wikipedia, probability theory is a branch of mathematics,
which I agree with.

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