From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Nov 16 11:59:31 2001
Subject: Statistics on octave - Comparison with R
From: Pierre-Andre Cornillon <pac at Uhb dot Fr>
To: help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 18:58:52 +0000 (WET)

Hello,

I have somewhere in octave manual that contributions on statistics are
welcome and i am wondering myself what are the advantages of octave versus
a typical statistical software such GNU-R.

For instance I have done the test (see in proceeding DSC 2001, J.W. Eaton)
tic (); x=[1:100000];total=0; for i=1:100000
total=total+x(i);endfor;toc()
(or the same with cpu_time)

and (under R)
system.time{x_1:100000;total_0;for(i in 1:100000) total_total+x[i]}

R was two times faster.

I used to use matlab on this kind of loop because Splus was incredibly
slow but now I don't see  any advantages and thus if there is no
advantage I think that the community of statistician will may be use
(in majority) GNU-R.

May be some advanced user have something to answer (I know that R
use static allocation of memory but is it an disadvantage for a
basic user ?)

Pierre-Andre Cornillon
Rennes II



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