starting inferior Splus process iESS[S]

[Steve McKinney]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rich Heiberger [mailto:rmh at surfer.sbm.temple.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 9:23 PM
> To: ess-help at stat.math.ethz.ch; Steve McKinney
> Subject: RE: starting inferior Splus process iESS[S]
> 
> 
> I can answer some of your questions.
> 
> With W95 (and maybe W98 and some others), if you start an 
> msdos session
> inside an emacs buffer using the M-x shell command, then quit 
> emacs before
> closing the msdos instance, it was impossible to do a shutdown.
> ..There was a fix posted by Francis J Wright,
>     msdos-shell-fix.el --- MS-DOS shell support.
> This is not an issue with W2000 or XP, and it may already be 
> incorporated
> into more recent emacs.  The fix was posted in October 1998 
> for NTemacs 20.3
> 
> M-x S+6-msdos starts an msdos shell and then starts S-Plus, 
> hence I placed
> that warning message in the startup message.

Thanks.  I'll sleep better tonight!  I should be fine running
emacs 21.2.

> 
> On fontification of dired, try adding this line to your .emacs
>   (global-font-lock-mode 1)

This works as advertised.  Thank you!

> 
> 
> 
> The line
> c:/programfiles/insightful/splus61/cmd/splus.exe 
> /MULTIPLEINSTANCES S_PRINT_COMMAND=gnuclientw.exe S_PROJ=e:/foo
> 
> suggests that you have an invalid address in your .emacs or 
> ess-site.el
> file
> "c:/programfiles/" is not right.  Replace it with
> "c:/progra~1/"

This address is correct.  To avoid the many problems encountered
with cygwin, apache tomcat, and other (including microsoft)
programs that choke on spaces in file names, I install
many programs to c:\programfiles.
Are ESS routines (or the cygwin routines they call)
restricted to DOS 8.3 file name conventions?
Is a folder name of more than 8 characters a problem?



> 
> ..The 30 second delay is builtin to ESS.  It is necessary on 
> 300MHz machines
> to allow the independent S-Plus process to initialize itself 
> before ESS starts
> sending it commands.  In principle ESS should be sensitive to 
> the speed of the
> processor and adjust the delay time.  My personal preference 
> is for S-Plus
> to work off a pipe.  On Windows, Sqpe works off the pipe and 
> doesn't have
> interactive graphics with wingraph and doesn't have the GUI.
> 
> The non-functioning S-Plus that you see looks like what you might get
> if the final "&" in a unix invocation were not there.  Why 
> you get it with
> msdos I don't know.  My recommendation is to fix the path and 
> use the cygwin
> shell invocation of S, that is the M-x S+6 and not bother with the
> M-x S+6-msdos.

When I try this I always get the error message


 c:/programfiles/insightful/splus61/cmd/splus.exe /MULTIPLEINSTANCES S_PRINT_COMMAND=gnuclientw.exe S_PROJ=e:/foo

 Process S+6 exited abnormally with code 128 at Tue Apr 15 17:52:59 2003

so I'm still trying to figure out what code 128 is about.

c:\cygwin\bin is in my Windows PATH variable.  Are there other
directories needed in the path to enable ESS to run S-PLUS?


> 
> Your startup line includes the argument
>     S_PRINT_COMMAND=gnuclientw.exe 
> .because we make the default assumption that you have gnuserv running.
> If you don't I recommend you get it.

I do have gnuserv running, and am always looking for tips
on how to get more functionality out of it.
Any suggestions or pointers to good websites would be appreciated.

> 
> Rich
> 


Thank you, Rich, for all your help.
I am getting closer to making the 
ESS - S-PLUS link fully functional.
Any additional advice appreciated.



Steven McKinney
Consulting Services
Insightful Corporation
 
smckinney at insightful.com
 
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