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Wondrous Oddities: R's function call semantics [2006]

• tlack 17y ago
  has anyone used R for non-math projects? it has some very interesting features but i'm not sure how well it would hold up for large projects, complicated data structures, etc.
  • cduan 17y ago
    It is great for drawing vector graphics. It also has capabilities for working with large data sets, as long as you don't do it the naive way (by reading a huge array into memory).
    • ez77 17y ago
      Would you (or anybody else) know why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAP_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAP_(software) states "Unlike R it [DAP] has been designed to be used on large data sets."? I read here and there that R is not that great handling huge amounts of data, but then I'm puzzled to know that it is widely being used in genetics... Help!
  • urlwolf 17y ago
    It has very good support for sparse matrices (package Matrix) and also for serializing big data structures and loading parts in memory sequentially (like SAS). See packages bigMemory, and ff. Actually, this view is probably the best entry point: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing... Where it's not so strong, of course, is in terms of web frameworks. Nothing that I could find, and, considering the scope of the language, it's allmost unreasonable to expect it.