Ali - <saveez <at> hotmail.com> writes: > R introduces itself as a 'statistical' language and environment. There are > many discussions about comparing R to MATLAB or mathematica (or other > similar software). It seems to me that these other software have a broader > range of applications. For example, in Mathematica one can solve a partial > differential equation numberically or do image processing, or, one can > connect a data acquisition card to MATLAB to acquire data from a measurement > and analyse the results. > > - Does R already provide such facilities?
some ... RSiteSearch("image analysis") http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/69200.html RSiteSearch("PDE") -- suggests not much in the way of numeric PDE solutions RSiteSearch("data acquisition") -- suggests not much (but see http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/Rhelp02a/archive/81317.html ) > - Was R design to be merely a statistical tool or was it designed with an > idea of a general mathematical tool in mind? It was designed as a "language and environment for statistical computing and graphics". However, since it provides interfaces to routines written in other languages (Tcl/Tk, C, Fortran, ...) and other programs (databases, GIS, etc.), it can do lots of other things. > - If the answer to the above is no, can R already be extended to include the > missing features simply by extra packages yes. or does it need some rational [???] > changes to support these features? no. You should think about why you want to extend R in these ways. If you already have access to Mathematica/MATLAB and are happy with their capabilities, you should just use them. Perhaps you can't afford them; are there other free/open tools that do what you want? If so, you should think about using them, or perhaps writing interfaces between them and R. cheers Ben Bolker ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.