[ESS] ESS[SAS] , ess-sas-submit, and submit-sas
Rodney Sparapani
rsparapa at mcw.edu
Fri Feb 24 16:19:35 CET 2006
Hi Erik:
I had a little trouble replying so I'm making the unusual choice of top-posting.
No flames please :o) The two methods of batch submission have a little history.
submit-sas came first from sas-mode. But, when I started using ESS back in '98
or so, I didn't like the behavior of waiting for the job to finish. I've been
working on medium to large databases so the jobs could take anywhere from many
minutes to days. I didn't realize that you could press C-g to avoid the wait
which has come up on the list with respect to ESS[R] recently. So, Rich and
I re-invented the ESS SAS batch functionality and ess-sas-submit was invented.
My thinking was that no
one would ever want to wait for a SAS job to end, but you have proved me wrong!
As far as errors go, the return code is reflected in the mini-buffer notifications
and we have provided F5 to goto the .log and the first error message, if any.
In any case, all of the legacy sas-mode functionality is basically unchanged so you
are free to use that if you prefer. However, most of it has not been tested
recently. In fact, iESS[SAS] hasn't worked for me in the last few versions of
ESS. Of course, patches are welcome.
Thanks,
Rodney
Hello -
I've used ESS together with R for several years and found it quite
useful. I've lately had to use ESS together with SAS.
I downloaded the latest ess (5.2.12) and installed it. I'm using XEmacs
under Linux (Red Hat Enterprise 4).
I then edited ess-site.el to provide the "local UNIX keys" to my SAS
mode in XEmacs. This is the mode that uses F3 to submit a SAS job to SAS.
It seems to me (and I may have some details incorrect) that there are
two separate methods for submitting a batch SAS job to SAS in ESS. The
first (and what happens when I press F3) is called ess-sas-submit, found
in file essa-sas.el. I would like my minibuffer to tell me when the SAS
job has completed, but using this function it simply reports "Done sas
cda -rsasuser &" immediately upon pushing F3. Upon examining the
*shell* buffer, it becomes clear that this "Done ..." output is actually
the result of the previous command because the "&" was used to put it in
the background. Changing the ess-sas-submit-post-command to remove the
"&" results in similar behavior, the result of a "cd" command is then
seen in the minibuffer upon submitting a SAS job.
The other method to submit a batch job to SAS from ESS is called
submit-sas, found in essl-sas.el. While that and other functions are
defined in that file, they don't seem to be used. I think I would
prefer submit-sas to ess-sas-submit because the minibuffer tells me when
SAS exits, and also if there were any errors. However, ess doesn't seem
to have an option to use submit-sas over ess-sas-submit. I can, and
have, bound a key to do submit-sas for me.
My question is, is there a reason ess-sas-submit is preferred over
submit-sas (there very well may be), and why isn't there an option to
choose between these two methods?
Perhaps because of some configuration on my system, ess-sas-submit isn't
working properly with my minibuffer. Have users who use SAS with ESS
experienced this same behavior?
Thanks for any insight,
Erik Iverson
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