The Wrong Choice: Locked in by license restrictions

2 messages · Murray Jorgensen, Roger D. Peng

Tue, May 27, 2003 4:15 PM #

A colleague pointed me to this article advocating R as a Matlab 
substitute. Here is the link (deliberately on two lines:

http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/
originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci902076,00.html

I'm not a Matlab user, but I understand that it provides a nice front 
end to the Linpack collection of numerical linear algebra routines. My 
friend and I wonder if R can really compete in that league. Does anyone 
know if there are published benchmark comparisons between R and other 
packages like Matlab with the focus on numerical stability rather than 
speed?

Cheers,

Murray

Dr Murray Jorgensen      http://www.stats.waikato.ac.nz/Staff/maj.html
Department of Statistics, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Email: maj at waikato.ac.nz                                Fax 7 838 4155
Phone  +64 7 838 4773 wk    +64 7 849 6486 home    Mobile 021 1395 862

Roger D. Peng

Tue, May 27, 2003 5:11 PM #

My experience with Matlab users is that they perfer Matlab because of 
the various toolkits that are available (image processing comes to 
mind).  With respect to standard linear algebra my guess is that Octave, 
Matlab, and R are comparable.  A guess, though....

-roger

Murray Jorgensen wrote: