Is R an interpreted or compiled programming language?

Question

score 22 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:18

22

The R FAQ says: "The core of R is an interpreted computer language".

edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:18

nbro

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answered Nov 04 '09 at 22:16

Michael Kohne

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score 11 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:12

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It's more accurate to say that the default implementation of some language is interpreted or compiled. But not the language itself!

edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:12

nbro

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answered Nov 04 '09 at 22:29

Wildcat

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score 10 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:15

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You can build a compiler or interpreter for any programming language. In general, the language itself is not compiled or interpreted.

So, R could be either interpreted or compiled. Nonetheless, in the most common implementation, R is interpreted.

edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:15

nbro

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answered Nov 04 '09 at 22:16

DigitalZebra

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score 9 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:09

9

R is an interpreted language.

edited Mar 16 '18 at 22:09

nbro

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answered Nov 04 '09 at 22:15

NawaMan

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score 3 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 04 '09 at 22:14

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R doesn't compile. There are projects that try to get it compiled: http://www.hipersoft.rice.edu/rcc/ , http://www.rforge.net/r2c/ but I can't find any currently supported.

That said, the performance on modern hardware seems reasonable for even larger workloads I have thrown at it (millions of records).

answered Nov 04 '09 at 22:14

Godeke

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Those aren't ready yet. See this related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1452235/deploying-r-without-r-into-c-or-c – Shane Nov 04 '09 at 22:31
The folks at Revolution Computing (http://www.revolution-computing.com/) are working on a version of R that's supposedly a few times faster than the standard distribution. It's still interpreted, though. – John D. Cook Nov 04 '09 at 22:36
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John, REvo R is still essentially the same R but it ships with MKL (faster blas) and (somewhat) easier parallel usage. The engine is identical for all intents and purposes. – Dirk Eddelbuettel Nov 05 '09 at 00:31

score -2 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 06 '11 at 21:09

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R is definitely written in C. I asked myself this question alittle while ago, and resolved it by downloaded the source code from http://www.r-project.org/.

answered Apr 06 '11 at 21:09

wespiserA

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Is R an interpreted or compiled programming language?

6 Answers6

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