R (http://www.r-project.org) implements the open-source version of the S language on which the commercial system S-Plus is based. R is more similar to Stata than to SAS, but is still very different from Stata. R is object oriented, and like Stata, holds all data in memory. Newer features in R can allow special block processing functions to be used to process large datasets in chunks. Except for non-graphical analysis of massive datasets (the only application in which SAS excels), open source R is the best statistical analysis and graphics package available today. It is also strong in linear algebra.
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R (http://www.r-project.org) implements the open-source version of the S language on which the commercial system S-Plus is based. R is more similar to Stata than to SAS, but is still very different from Stata. R is object oriented, and like Stata, holds all data in memory. Newer features in R can allow special block processing functions to be used to process large datasets in chunks. Except for non-graphical analysis of massive datasets (the only application in which SAS excels), open source R is the best statistical analysis and graphics package available today. It is also strong in linear algebra.