A computing environment for statisticians.

This is an exciting time for statistics and computing: current research is exploring new ideas of fundamental importance to how statistics is done, and many of the ideas are also pushing at frontiers of computer science. This paper describes recent research in computing environments for statistics and in particular, the Quantitative Programming Environment(QPE) whose aim is to provide a highly interactive, integrated computing environment for statistics and related applications. Stimulated by experience with the S system (Becker and Chambers, 1984) and by a number of general developments in computing, QPE aims to provide the most effective programming environment for quantitative applications in the near future.