[ESS] need help locating an old thread

[A.J. Rossini]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu> wrote:
> On 02/ 8/11 03:22 PM, Christophe Rhodes wrote:

 <-- trimmed out -->

>> Bit difficult to describe really.  The basic idea is "everything is an
>> object", to contrast with the Unix approach of "everything is a stream
>> of bytes".  (Emacs/comint is a bit in the middle)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Christophe
>
> I can see that there may be a lot of pluses from such an undertaking.
> But, no offense, the minuses are equally apparent.
>
> 1) an undertaking

Always the most difficult component.   And in fact, the one minus that
causes me concern with proposing serious consideration for "dropping
this in" to the ESS codebase as anything other than an alternative
idea.   And I agree strongly with Rodney that we need to see code, not
just talk (Christophe provided a nice kernel to start with, though).

> 2) the comint code is difficult to read/write, but, for the most part, it
> works and represents human-years of time on test; most bugs have
> been found/fixed; new versions of comint require tweaking, but it's
> just that, tweaking

But it's still an issue, because of the ease of  creating of invalid
"meta syntax".  I.e. who among us has done the unbalanced "  trick to
result in "interesting" highlighted components.

> 3) if 1 and 2 are not enough, then I would add:  who amongst us knows
> SLIME?

Me.  Using it on a weekly basis (a bit more than ESS, actually).


The advantage of the streams is related to making it simpler to
implement one of my pet wishes -- the ability to voice-over and
evaluate the use of audio as a multimedia feedback to the data
analyst, and evaluate communication styles which increase the
efficiency of both knowledge extraction and communication.

And it could ("tony dreaming again") increase the potential for
smoother asynchronous communication.  i.e. when I type/submit too fast
compared to the computations that are running, to queue them up.

best,
-tony

blindglobe at gmail.com
Muttenz, Switzerland.
"Commit early,commit often, and commit in a repository from which we
can easily roll-back your mistakes" (AJR, 4Jan05).

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