R

The R computing environment is the Lingua franca for the statistics community. R is already adapted to reproducible research, most commonly through the use of Sweave and the R community is actively addressing the problem of reproducibility as evidenced by the number of reproducible research packages in CRAN.

Installation

If you do not already have R installed on your machine then:

GNU/Linux

Under Debian-based GNU/Linux distros:

~$ sudo apt-get install r-base-dev

Under Fedora/Red Hat distros:

~$ sudo yum install R

Windows

Visit the official installation page for Windows. Also there is a Windows install FAQ page.

Running R

<<calculator>>= ans <- 2 + 5 print(ans) @

R can be thought of as a calculator that does a great many things. It is important to understand that R can be run interactively or as a script.