It’s actually a special command in ipython, not python. You can find some documentation at http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/rel-0.10.2/html/interactive/tutorial.html#source-code-handling-tips.
jcborras
Actually, there is a return() primitive in R. It’s not a language reserved word though but it provides you with a facility for non-local returns.
jcborras
CRAN is a blessing and a curse. Yes it has codes for any single type of statistical analysis there exists out there no matter how exotic. But at the same time its overall user experience is far from consistent which when developing systems with it can be annoying. Some time is required too before packages mature.
One of the good things of R is that it’s became a de facto standard for describing scientific computations or at least in certain fields. The Mapple/Mathematica/MacSyma systems are a different league, and MATLAB has a very strong position in DSP circles, but overall circulation or usage of R codes is surprisingly high in the academia.
The people hanging out in the official R mailing lists make a fantastic community too….
Indeed, all good points. If I were to start ranting on the problems in CRAN I’d end up with a full other post, and inconsistency & incompatibility are near the top of that list.
I think the power of R, the language, comes from Scheme. Scheme is very small and elegant, so this makes meta programming, serialization, etc simple in R. R and Python are both dynamic, but I won’t expect Python will have something like ggplot2, I mean the DSL interface.
tanyaM
I’ve read data.table described as ‘game-changer’, ‘best kept secret’…and I like what I’ve managed to figure out to do with it so far. I’m not an advanced useR yet nor a programmer so I’m finding the official documentation a little cryptic and I haven’t found many tutorials yet (not that I’m complaining—I am always truly grateful for the generosity of the gurus). But (and I hope I am not touching any sore spots) is it noticeably absent from the Rstudio user community and some other major forums? Are there any vested interests (commercial applications or intellectual competitiveness) at play? I hope the new R data wrangling tools (e.g. plyr, reshape2, data.table, (Hmisc, sqldf ?)) will continue to develop and play nice.
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