Introduction to Calling R Functions

R is a freely available language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. Like IMLPlus, the R language has features suitable for developers of statistical algorithms: the ability to manipulate matrices and vectors, a large number of built-in functions for computing statistical quantities and for creating statistical graphs, and the capability to extend the basic function library by writing user-defined functions. There are also a large number of R packages that implement specialized computations.

SAS/IML Studio has an interface to the R language that enables you to submit R statements from within your IMLPlus program. In previous chapters you learned how to transfer data between SAS/IML Studio and a SAS server, how to call SAS procedures, and how to read the results back into SAS/IML Studio. This chapter describes how to transfer data to R, how to call R functions, and how to transfer the results to a number of SAS data structures.

The program statements in this chapter are distributed with SAS/IML Studio. To open the program that contains the statements:

Select File Open File from the main menu.

In order to run the examples in this chapter, you must first install R on the same PC that runs SAS/IML Studio. For details on how to install R and which versions of R are supported, see the chapter "Accessing R" in the SAS/IML Studio online Help.