[ESS] notebook style as an alternative of Sweave?

[A.J. Rossini]

On 10/30/05, Stephen Eglen <S.J.Eglen at damtp.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Na Li writes:
>  >
>  > When I use Mathematica or Maple, I like the idea of the 'notebook'.  There is
>  > an emacs mode to emulate that: http://sourceforge.net/projects/notebook
>  >
>  > I wonder how difficult it would be to implement it for R.  (Not sure about
>  > how to handle graphics though).
>
> The idea is an interesting one.  Graphics indeed might be a problem,
> but the readme clasims it should not be very hard to extend it to
> other programs.  Have you tested the notebook code?  That might help
> us first to see how well it works on supported languages like Matlab,
> Octave, MuPad.
>
> One slight concern is that it seems the last release was Feb 2003.
>
> Graphics would indeed be a problem, but rather than having them within
> the doc, they might have to be external.  Or, you could take a look at
> what things like auctex and imaxima do - by planting graphics inline
> to an emacs buffer of text.  I especially like imaxima in this regard,
> for an interface to maxima:
> http://members3.jcom.home.ne.jp/imaxima/
>
> hmm, there used to be a screenshot there!

I looked at it as well -- I'm less worried by the "date", it seems to
be reasonably well written and designed code (unlike, say,
ess-inf.el).

Also, it shouldn't be too hard to write the wrapping/in-lining code to
extend graphics chunks to in-line the results when (re)generated.  
("not too hard" != "not time consuming").

I still havn't quite "gotten" the work-flow.  It appears to be able to
dump out a shell script to reconstruct the document -- but I'm not
clear if the process is the same or a different one for each
code-window (if different same, synchronicity is an issue, if same,
temporality (evaluation order) is an issue.


best,
-tony

blindglobe at gmail.com
Muttenz, Switzerland.
"Commit early,commit often, and commit in a repository from which we can easily
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