[ESS] Emacs freezes upon 'Starting evaluation'

[Paul Metzner]

Dear all,

I dug up this conversation on this list from March 2006 because I'm experiencing the very same problem.

http://osdir.com/ml/emacs.ess.general/2006-03/msg00107.html

Sometimes when I send a region from an R script to the R buffer, Emacs freezes with the modeline saying 'Starting evaluation'. C-g or C-C won't help, neither will 'killall R' from another console. I'll have to 'killall Emacs', eventually. The same bit of code will evaluate nicely if I send it over to the R buffer line by line.
I followed Martin Maechler's suggestion and ran the following command on my script:

tr -d '\-.,<=:)(][[:alnum:]' < script.R | od -a

I get all kinds of characters, not only 'sp' and 'nl' (%, \, $, {, *, etc.). The file is encoded as UTF-8 but I get the same characters when I set the encoding to Latin-1. Here are my system specs:

OS: Darwin 10.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.8.0 (OS X 10.6.8)
Emacs: GNU Emacs 23.3
ESS: 5.13
R: 2.13.2

Does anybody else experience the same problem? I wonder if there's a solution to the problem.

Best,
Paul