I have written software professionally in perhaps a dozen programming languages, and the hardest language for me to learn has been R. The language is actually fairly simple, but it is unconventional. These notes are intended to make the language easier to learn for someone used to more commonly used languages such as C++, Java, Perl, etc.

R is more than a programming language. It is an interactive environment for doing statistics. I find it more helpful to think of R as having a programming language than being a programming language. The R language is the scripting language for the R environment, just as VBA is the scripting language for Microsoft Excel. Some of the more unusual features of the R language begin to make sense when viewed from this perspective.

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