[ESS] Avoiding printing large R objects

[Dan Davison]

The way I most frequently cause an undesired termination of my emacs/ESS/R
session is by accidentally printing a very big object. ESS seems to get
quite unhappy, presumably trying to keep up with the colour highlighting
etc. I usually kill the processes (R and xemacs) manually. I suppose I
could alter R code for print method functions so that they refuse to print
oversized things (though I'm not sure how I'd measure size), or have
.Rprofile always keep an appropriate personal version of print() in my
global environment (or get better at remembering to use invisible() and
str()), but is there a standard ESS solution to this, or could someone
propose a better one?

Thanks,

Dan

ESS 5.2.3 in xemacs in debian (testing) linux 2.6.6

in R:
> version
         _                
platform i386-pc-linux-gnu
arch     i386             
os       linux-gnu        
system   i386, linux-gnu  
status                    
major    2                
minor    0.0              
year     2004             
month    10               
day      04               
language R