S (programming language)
S is a statistical programming language developed primarily by John Chambers and Rick Becker, Trevor Hastie, William Cleveland and Allan Wilks of Bell Laboratories. The aim of the language, as expressed by John Chambers, is "to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully". It was formerly widely used by academic researchers., but has now been superseded by the partially backwards compatible R language, a part of the GNU free software project. S-PLUS was a widely used commercial implementation of S that was formerly sold by TIBCO Software.
History
"Old S"
S is one of several statistical computing languages that were designed at Bell Laboratories, and first took form between 1975–1976. Up to that time, much of the statistical computing was done by directly calling Fortran subroutines; however, S was designed to offer an alternate and more interactive approach, motivated in part by exploratory data analysis advocated by John Tukey. Early design decisions that hold even today include interactive graphics devices, and providing easily accessible documentation for the functions.Development of the project was led by John Chambers and Trevor Hastie, and included developers Richard Becker, Allan Wilks, John Chambers, and William Cleveland, all of whom were then employees of AT&T. Out of the developers who contributed to S, Chambers is generally agreed to be the most significant contributor. Chambers received the Software System Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his work on S.
The first working version of S was built in 1976, and ran on the GCOS operating system. At this time, S was unnamed; naming suggestions included ISCS , SCS , and SAS . The name 'S' was chosen, as it was a common letter in the suggestions and consistent with other programming languages designed from the same institution at the time. It stands for the word "statistics".
When UNIX/32V was ported to the 32-bit DEC VAX, computing on the Unix platform became feasible for S. In late 1979, S2 was ported from GCOS to UNIX, which would become the new primary platform.
In 1980 the first version of S was distributed outside Bell Laboratories and in 1981 source versions were made available. S was distributed freely in academic circles, and became popular among academic statisticians. The research team at Bell Laboratories published two books in 1984: S: An Interactive Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics and Extending the S System. Also, in 1984 the source code for S became licensed through AT&T Software Sales for education and commercial purposes.
"New S"
The first version of S-PLUS was released by Statistical Sciences, Inc. in 1988. S-PLUS was later sold to TIBCO Software. By this time, many changes were made to S and the syntax of the language with the release of S3. The New S Language was published to introduce the new features, such as the transition from macros to functions and how functions can be passed to other functions. Many other changes to the S language were to extend the concept of "objects", and to make the syntax more consistent. However, many users found the transition to New S difficult, since their macros needed to be rewritten. Many other changes to S took hold, such as the use of X11 and PostScript graphics devices, rewriting many internal functions from Fortran to C, and the use of double precision arithmetic. The New S language is very similar to that used in modern versions of S-PLUS and R.The graphical user interface of S was also updated interactive graphical features after integration with Axum.
Statistical Models in S was published in 1991, introducing Wilkinson-Rogers formula notation for defining statistical models, data frame objects, and modifications to the use of object methods and classes.