R graphics

[Mike Miller]

It is great to have many of the standard MATLAB commands for graphics in 
Octave, but I'm wondering how hard it would be to massively expand 
graphical capabilities by adding some of the R functionality to Octave.

R is a GNU package and it is doing really well with its statistical 
graphics.  If we had a way to take that free R graphical functionality and 
use it in Octave, I think it would be great.

Maybe it's a crazy idea, but both R and Octave are GNU projects that do 
similar things.  I would love to see more integration of the two, and not 
just in graphics.  If there were a way for Octave to make calls to R for 
things like regression, loess, etc., it might give us a big boost in 
functionality for a relatively small amount of work (just *relatively* 
small -- I'm sure it would be a major effort).  I just found this web 
site...

http://www.omegahat.org/RMatlab/

...and am cc'ing the author (Duncan Temple Lang) on this message.  His 
RMatlab is distributed under the GPL.  Maybe it could be adapted for 
Octave and R.

I think some people on this list have been making contributions both to R 
and to Octave, so maybe they can tell us if there is some merit (or no 
merit) to my idea.

Mike

P.S.  This is a handy page for Octave users who want to learn some R:

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/R-and-octave-2.txt

--
Michael B. Miller, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
and Institute of Human Genetics
University of Minnesota
http://taxa.epi.umn.edu/~mbmiller/



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------