R

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.

R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.

One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.

• cmdscale() gets new option list. for increased flexibility when a list should be returned.
• configure now supports texinfo version 6.0, which (unlike the change from 4.x to 5.0) is a minor update. (Wish of PR#16456.)
• (Non-Windows only) download.file() with default method = "auto" now chooses "libcurl" if that is available and a https:// or ftps:// URL is used.
• There are implications for how proxies need to be set (see ?download.file): also, cacheOK = FALSE is not supported.
• chooseCRANmirror() and chooseBioCmirror() now offer HTTPS mirrors in preference to HTTP mirrors. This changes the interpretation of their ind arguments: see their help pages.
• capture.output() gets optional arguments type and split to pass to sink(), and hence can be used to capture messages.