The Omegahat Environment: New Possibilities for Statistical Computing

Statistical environments such as S, R, Xlisp-Stat and other have had a dramatic effect on the way we, statistics practitioners, think about data and statistical methodollogy. However, the possibilities and challenges introduced by recent technological developments and the general ways we use computing conflict with the computational model of these systems. We explore some of these challenges and identify the need to support easy integration of functionality from other domains, and to export statistical methodology to other audiences and applications, both statically and dynamically. Existing systems can bw improved in these domains with some already implemented extensions (see Section 5). However, the development of a new environment and computational model that exploits modern tools designed to handle many general aspects of these challenges appears more promising as a long term approach.