Hello, I am not currently using R but I have been using S+ for sevaral years. I think that I fit in the category of power users, never using the GUI prefering the flexibility of a command line interface (CLI). In a short while I will try to move to R, that is if we can convince our IT people that installing a freeware package on a Unix server will not damaged the companie's network! The main reasons for which I want to move to R, at least give it a try, are 1) David Smith of Insightful annonced us a couple months ago that there is not plan to further develop the 6.0.4 Release 1 for Sun SPARC, SunOS 5.8, 64-bit version of S+ and as we deal with very large problems, addressing well over 4GB of memory, a 64 bit version is required and we bought that Sun machine for this sole purpose. 2) From what I read and heard R manages its memory a little better than S+ and is a little faster, non negligeable aspects when dealing with large problems.
All I said so far has little to do with the title of this email. I am getting to it. While I am pretty happy with a CLI I was asked to evaluate a few statistical packages to be used by casual users in my group. One of the main requirements is ease of use, hence the GUI, furthermore, it will be a lot easier for me to support them in their analyses if we use the same software. I spent the two last days reading the R-FAQ and searching the R groups mail archives, including the R-GUI mail group and as a consequence of all this reading I am a bit confused. At first I gathered that there was no GUI for R, that R was strickly a CLI language. What brought me to that conclusion is the fact that on the R-project pages they refer the readers to external builders of GUIs like the R-Commander of John Fox, Brodgar, TeXmacs, SciViews etc.. On the other hand searching the mail archives for the word "R-GUI" yielded well over 500 hits. After reading a few tens of those I realized that there existed, after building R, an executable called "Rgui.exe", what is that? is that a GUI version of R or not? can someone set my bearings straight on that issue? Thanks in advance for your valuable comments, G�rald Jean Analyste-conseil (statistiques), Actuariat t�lephone : (418) 835-4900 poste (7639) t�lecopieur : (418) 835-6657 courrier �lectronique: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "In God we trust all others must bring data" W. Edwards Deming ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
