[ESS] need help locating an old thread

[A.J. Rossini]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 8:24 PM, Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu> wrote:
> On 02/10/11 10:19 AM, A.J. Rossini wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
> Yes, but I think I see now.  It would allow you to pass objects back and
> forth intelligently such as data frames, graphics, packages, etc.  Sort of a
> CORBA translation layer between elisp and R.  If it could
> be written more simply than ESS[R], then it might have a chance.  I bet it
> would make things like R2WinBUGS much easier.
>
> Since we are on the subject, I wonder what it would take to compile R into
> emacs directly; sort of like what has been done in BRUGS and/or TeXmacs.
>  Then you would have a rich grammar of both R and elisp functions at your
> disposal (or R based on elisp primitives I suppose). SXEmacs has the ability
> to do stuff like that, but I have never used it since it is Linux only.
>  Maybe I'll give it a try as we migrate to Linux.

A loadable R module.  It's tricky, I've got code to do that for Common
Lisp, but not sure that it'll be simple or workable with the SXEmacs
foreign function interface.



-- 
best,
-tony

blindglobe at gmail.com
Muttenz, Switzerland.
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