Hi R-Devel, The Sage project (http://www.sagemath.org) has been working extremely hard for several years to create a viable free open source alternative to Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, and Magma. Numerous users have requested statistical functionality. Though Sage includes scipy and numpy, which have some statistical functionality, we've decided the best longterm solution is to strongly integrate R into Sage. We started doing this in December, and now include R in all copies of Sage, and include R as part of the Sage build process.
R/Sage integration will have many potential benefits for the R projects: 1. Sage has a cross platform graphical user interface, which also works over the web; it will be possible to use this as a GUI for R as well. This is what many young people like and feel comfortable with, and it makes deployment in a teaching environment very easy. 2. The Sage Foundation has received funding from Microsoft to do a full native port of Sage and its components to Microsoft Windows (MSVC 32 *and* 64-bit). The more integrated R is into Sage, the more important it will be for us to do a 64-bit MSVC port of R (instead of using your 32-bit only mingw binaries/build system), which is something R users would greatly benefit from. The Sage Foundation has also received funding to do and maintain 32 and 64-bit Solaris ports of Sage and all components; again R can benefit from this. )This funding means highly talented full and part-time developers working on these ports.) 3. Sage has substantial mathematical functionality that is not in R, ranging from optimization code to advanced number theory and cryptographic algorithms; combining R with Sage results in a very powerful environment for mathematical calculation that really extends how R will get used. At present, the best possible way to encourage and support R being fully integrated into Sage would be for the R Google Summer of Code Mentors to select the R / Sage integration project for one of their (four?) project slots. Currently the one R GSoC project is rated number six, so is not likely to be funded unless it receives support from other mentors (or Google ups the number of allocations). -- william -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
