philip@utstat.uucp (Philip McDunnough) (03/12/91)
A number(large) of people have requested information regarding a remark I made about running New S on my 040 cube. I can't possibly answer everyone( sorry), but perhaps this will help. S, and its newer version New S, is a Bell Labs product. It is a complete statistical, data analysis, graphics' language for analysing a wide variety of data. It is also a programming language which interfaces to C,Fortran and Unix in a very natural way. A good idea about S may be obtained from the book The (New) S Language by Becker, Chambers and Wilks. This is published by Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole. S can be used to handle simple well-defined statistical problems which are often analysed using "canned" packages such as Systat, SAS, SPSS, etc... However, the strength of S lies in its adabtability in creating new S-functions which can then be used to create others and so on. Thus, the language is a living and exponentially growing statistical environment. New S-functions appear regularly, and are typically placed on the public S-archive. These functions allow the user access to the latest methodology for handling statistical analyses. Virtually every area is covered. S(New S) is the computer language/environment of the statistical community. As S(New S) is a Bell Labs' product, users should contact AT&T's software sales. There is a commercial binary version available from Statsci in Seattle. This version adds some time series functions( beyond those which come with New S) and graphics' capabilities, such as rotating 3-d plots and brushing. It is also commercially supported. Unfortunately, I do not believe they have ported S+( the name of the product) to the NeXT yet. However New S, which is very rich, has been ported to the NeXT by Doug Bates of the Department of Statistics in the University of Wisconsin. It is a very solid port and has drivers for all sorts of terminals( including an X11 one!), tektronics,etc...Multiple sessions are possible and of course there is a Postscript driver, which allows viewing plots,etc...via the viewer. I highly recommend this package. It is first-rate software, and deserves to be on the NeXT. I hope this answers some of your many questions. I hope to see S-functions emanating from stations and cubes everywhere! Philip McDunnough Professor of Statistics University of Toronto philip@utstat.toronto.edu