[ESS] need help locating an old thread

[A.J. Rossini]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:06 PM, Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu> wrote:
> On 02/10/11 03:45 AM, A.J. Rossini wrote:
>>>
>>> 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
>
> I'm still trying to imagine how it helps.  If R was written in Lisp,
> then I can see that SLIME is exactly the right thing to do (maybe XLispStat
> missed an opportunity here).

I'll take a stab at explaining it better -- basically, the client/R
side ("swankR") could do something like expand the output of

lm(y~x)

into:

the object to be returned

audio to be routed via emacspeak to the speaker (voice or appropriate music)

visuals to be inserted into appropriate buffers

summaries to be split into a different buffer

or some other cleanly parseable protocol, and know that the protocol
is "proper".    This also helps with automagic debugging (parsing R
exceptions and errors into appropriate places, where they can be
computed on and Emacs probes R and the source for more info, etc).

Basically, it makes computations and automagic responses easier to setup.

But probably I've been opaque again.

best,
-tony

blindglobe at gmail.com
Muttenz, Switzerland.
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