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General Plotting Commands Help

3 messages · Deepfish, David Winsemius, William Dunlap

#
I am rather new to R and struggling with the syntax. I am trying to do simple
plots and I can't get anything but errors. Specifically, I would like to
know how to plot 3D scatterplots and using polar coordinates.

So far I've tried installing the scatterplot3D package and have copied and
pasted example code into R but it still returns " "Error: could not find
function "scatterplot3D" ". Same thing happens when I've tried
polar.plot(...).

I don't know if I didn't install the package correctly, the packages don't
work on my machine (Windows 7 64bit), or I'm just out in left field...

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advanced

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#
On Jun 20, 2011, at 4:52 PM, Deepfish wrote:

            
Most of the time when getting that message, newbies (and oldies) have  
forgotten to type:

require(scatterplot3d)  # NOT scatterplot3D
If you have not installed the package properly, the error message will  
tell you it cannot be found, and you should always report the complete  
error message when communicating with r-help!

  
    
#
This is off the topic, but when you use require(packageName)
you only get a warning and an invisibly returned value of FALSE
if the package is not installed so shouldn't it be called
wouldLikeToLoadPackage(packageName)?  library(packageName) has
the advantage that it throws an error if packageName is not
installed.

My real question is whether there is a standard function
to load a package, installing it if it is not already installed?
This might be useful in a cloud computing environment, where you
might install just R on a new machine in the cloud and have it
install packages as needed instead of you having to know which
packages need to be installed before running your job.  You
would just have to make sure options("repos") was set so that
the install.packages() calls would work.