Here is a benchmark comparing R, Octave, Matlab, S-PLUS, and a few other common mathematical programming languages. http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.htm

Here is a benchmark comparing R, Octave, Matlab, S-PLUS, and a few other common mathematical programming languages. http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html Suprisingly, R is one of the best in terms of speed, comparable to Matlab (Matlab is pretty fast if you vectorize your code). Plus, if you like functional programming, the R language is based on Scheme.