Statistics::r is a module to controls the r interpreter (r project for statistical computing: http://www.r-project.org/). it lets you start r, pass commands to it and retrieve the output. a shared mode allow to have several instances of statistics::r talk to the same r process.

the current statistics::r implementation uses pipes (for stdin, stdout and stderr) to communicate with r. this implementation should be more efficient and reliable than that in previous version, which relied on reading and writing files.