R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is similar to S, which was developed at Bell Laboratories by John Chambers et al. It provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques .
The R programming language, sometimes described as GNU S, is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It was originally created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (hence the name R) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R core team. R is considered by its developers to be an implementation of the S programming language, with semantics derived from Scheme.
In computational complexity theory, R is the class of decision problems solvable by a Turing machine, which is the set of all recursive languages. R is often identified with the class of 'effectively computable' functions (the Church-Turing thesis).