R Programming -- the following examples illustrate the use of the R Programming
language for use in statistical graphing suitable for Norwegian students (the
comments are in Norwegian). The R Programming language is available for most
machines free at www.r-project.org and can be started with ease at any 
free standard Linux such as Ubuntu (with the Ubuntu Extras installed) from 
www.ubuntu.com. Ubuntu is a free operating system which runs at most
PC laptops and desktops easily enough and which provides adequate parallels
to most programs available at commercial platforms. An alternative which in some
ways is nearer such as the technically useful CentOS.org Linux is Xubuntu.org,
the latter is an officially supported alternative of Ubuntu.
  One gets the R Programming language e.g. by going to the Ubuntu Software Center 
and installing RKward, which is a graphical program that helps one to get started 
with R. It provides a well-made searchable documentation option, which is the main
way we suggest that it is used. To start R itself, one simply opens a Terminal in 
Ubuntu and types the capital letter R. One can then paste the graphical examples 
in the following texts that we have prepared. In Ubuntu, the command gedit is a 
simple text editor from which it is easy to copy (with ctr-c) and then paste 
(by right-clicking the mouse and selecting Paste) when inside the Terminal frame 
that has R started. In learning by example, consulting the documentation on bits
of the examples, one may be able to extract what is necessary to put together a
suitable amount of statistical work e.g. for a thesis.



Save all the following examples, which are each in .txt form so that they can
be read by all simple text editors, and open them in your own computer in the 
simplest text editor it has, then copy and paste each example as you learn about
them from the Norwegian comments and/or by retrieving the location of the 
same or similiar R examples in the R manual (and as for futher use, cfr open 
source licenses for the R project, including documentation, beneath, and in the 
link to R-project.org above):

                         **** [R programmering]
                                  I
                                  I              GRAFIKK-PLOTTING SOM STARTES VIA TEKST:
                                  I              (norwegian informal commentaries after # in these)
                                  +------------> r-info01.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info02.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info03.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info04.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info05.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info06.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info07.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info08.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info09.txt 
                                  I
                                  I
                                  +------------> r-info10.txt 




Copyright info: each example included is a tiny excerpt, modified when suitable, 
extracted from the vast documentation available with the the Open Source licensed 
R-project. It is just because the project has been so strongly documented that
it is sometimes difficult to get a handle on it to begin working with it
practically. Also, much of the documentation in the R Project has been generated 
over a long time, by people using many different platforms and sometimes there
are important variations in how things must concretely be done which is not
stated clearly and in a pedagogical way in the documentation. It is not thereby
the best solution to go to automatic program generation, for one will want to
have a relationship to the program texts themselves, not merely to frames and
buttons and windows, when one is going to work with some depth with statistics.
The few help pages here created are intended to get students who are fresh to 
this form of programming going and who mostly wants to get going with making
some statistical plots started, without them having to navigate the masses
of examples and the often highly technical documentation parts. 
Licensing information for the R programming language is available at this 
link: www.r-project.org/Licenses/.
For any use of these examples beyond educational purposes, please locate the
similar info in the official R-Project and review the licenses there. If these 
examples do not work for some reason, which may be associated to the sometimes 
changing versions of such free projects, please consult updated documentation that 
follows your installation. These notes are provided as-if without any guarantees and 
in an educational spirit, indicating a support to the notion of thinking through the
patterns of numbers while interacting with a text terminal type of console. This
has, in vague ways, been one of the many sources of influence in developing the
later forms of G15 programming language runnable also in our Firth platform. 
  Good luck with your work with numbers. Note that while we support the notion
of using such interactive programming activities to get a stronger relationship
to numbers, we do not thereby subscribe to all sorts of networks of assumptions
sometimes associated with statistical graphing. The practical effect of this is
seen in how we have implemented PMN in open source without imposing a particular
theoretical-statistical scheme; but it is done with awareness of the importance
of a general type of perception over also numbers.

h-reusch@frisurf.no