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Matlab, R, and S-PLUS are all different animals. They are usually used for different things (and what they are used for can vary from person to person). For ins
by buckwild 16y ago
Matlab, R, and S-PLUS are all different animals. They are usually used for different things (and what they are used for can vary from person to person). For instance, I use matlab for object oriented scientific programming, R for quick and dirty (but math intensive) scripts, and S-PLUS for quick and dirty stats intensive scripts. Long story short, S-PLUS is geared towards statistics (better modules, functions, etc). If you do some searching, you'll find that R is actually an offspring of S, with S-PLUS being R's sibling. If one can program in R, picking up S-PLUS should be cake since the syntax and programming hats are similar.
I don't really like to type that much, hence my initial terse commentary--but I can certainly oblige someone who is genuinely interested :-)
- T_S_ 16y agoR and S-Plus are very similar. Curious when you would prefer S-plus over R?
- wildanimal 16y agoS-PLUS objects reside on the hard drive whereas R's are stored entirely in memory. So R is faster for smaller computations but runs against limitations when the data sets are large, though you can use the bigmemory library or store your data in external databases - e.g., SQLite or PostgreSQL and pull off chunks as you need them. R also had a much more extensive library but I heard that S-PLUS (as of version 8) made their program compatible with R so that R's libraries could be used in S-PLUS. Also, R has lexical scoping; I think S-PLUS only has global and local like Matlab. I personally like lexical scoping so can't think of cases when you'd find S-PLUS's scope definition advantageous.
- jacobolus 16y ago> Long story short, S-PLUS is geared towards statistics (better modules, functions, etc). This is still an extremely uninformative answer. Oh well.