1. GNU R statistical computing language and environment R is `GNU S' - A language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is similar to the award-winning S system, which was developed at Bell Laboratories by John Chambers et al. It provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques (linear and nonlinear modelling, statistical tests, time series analysis, classification, clustering, ...). R is designed as a true computer language with control-flow constructions for iteration and alternation, and it allows users to add additional functionality by defining new functions. For computationally intensive tasks, C, C++ and Fortran code can be linked and called at run time. S is the statistician's Matlab and R is to S what Octave is to Matlab. This packages is a meta-package which eases the transition from the pre-1.5.0 package setup with its larger r-base package. Once installed, it can be safely removed and apt-get will automatically upgrade its components during future upgrades. Providing this packages gives a way to users to then only install r-base-core (but not, say, r-base-latex) if they so desire. From Debian 3.0r0 APT