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As promised, the source distribution for R 2.15.2 is now available for download from the master CRAN repository. (Binary distributions for Windows, MacOS and Linux will be available from the CRAN mirror network in the coming days.) This latest point-update — codenamed “Trick or Treat” — improves the performance of the R engine and adds a few minor but useful features. Detailed changes can be found in the NEWS file, but highlights of the improvements include:

New statistical analysis method: Multistratum MANOVA

Hyman's method of constructing monotonic interpolation splines is now available.

Improved support for Polish language users

Functions in the parallel package (such as parLapply) will make use of a default cluster if one is specified.

Improved performance and reduced memory usage for some commonly-used functions including array, rep, tabulate and hist

Increased memory available for data on 64-bit systems (increased to 32Gb from 16Gb)

Several minor bugfixes

There is likely to be at least one further update to the 2.15.x series: a round-up of any further changes will probable be released as 2.15.3 shortly before R 2.16.0 is released, most likely around March 2013.

r-announce mailing list: R 2.15.2 is released