BUG in S-Plus 6 for Windows (was Re: ESS with S-PLUS 6 for Windows)

[Rich Heiberger]

It looks like to me like you found a bug in S-Plus 6.
I am copying this message with my analysis to betazone at insightful.com.

The bug is the following.
When you run Sqpe+6 inside an emacs shell buffer, either bash or msdos,
Sqpe+6 does not respond correctly to the command
  options(interactive=T)
What it does,
  it sets the option options()$interactive to T
  it changes the report from interactive() to T
What it doesn't do
  it doesn't behave interactively, specifically it doesn't issue the
  "> " prompt at the beginning of a new line.

The Sqpe+6 does behave correctly inside a standalone bash window.  It
comes up by default with interactive() as T.  It doesn't have the option
set though, it reports
  > options()$interactive
  NULL
which I think is an error (although a minor one).

This is a shift in behavior that Insightful introduced between Sqpe+4
and Sqpe+6.  Sqpe+4 behaved correctly when given the
  options(interactive=T)
command.

I don't yet have an idea on how to respond to this bug from within
emacs and ESS.  I will continue to think about it and would also appreciate
suggestions.


A secondary issue is that ESS 5.1.16 is very out of date.  The current
release is 5.1.18 and it is out of date.  The new release 5.1.19 (any
day now, which I hope means next week, in time for the Fall semester)
has S+6 builtin, including the distinctions in behavior between S+6
for Unix and S+6 for Windows.  Until 5.1.19 is released the best way to
use S-Plus 6 for Windows is to set the emacs variables

inferior-Sqpe+4-program-name
inferior-Sqpe+4-SHOME-name
to point to your Sqpe+6 locations.

In 5.1.19 we do that for you and distinguish between Sqpe+4 and Sqpe+6.

Rich
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