[ESS] ESS[SAS]: Submit region starting new SAS session?

[Sparapani, Rodney]

> 
> Hi Rodney and Paul,
> 
> Thanks for the suggestions. It looks like I'm in version 5.11 -- clearly a few versions behind. Upgrading is
> not in the cards, I'm afraid, though I appreciate that that makes it hard for others to help.

Circa 2010 I'm afraid.  So you are only 5 years out-of-date instead of 14 ;o)

> Most of my workflow in SAS has been about data management -- understanding how the data tables relate to one
> another, making sure I've merged them correctly, finding unexpected things (outliers, missingness,
> illegal values), and occasionally using procs to create secondary datasets of parameter estimates etc.
> So the loss of the ability to keep datasets around for interactive poking and prodding is actually a pretty
> big stumbling block for me -- they're not as powerful as the data structures you get in R, but they're most of
> why I use SAS at all.
> 
> I wonder how it works in Windows? The library names, temporary datasets, etc. do persist on Windows until
> the program sas.exe is shut down. The version of SAS I have access to here is the same one I started
> programming with in Windows, so I know that's not principally a function of code age.

It doesn't.  There is no ESS[SAS] interactive support on Windows since
the -stdio switch does not exist on that platform.
http://ess.r-project.org/Manual/ess.html#ESS_0028SAS_0029_002d_002dWindows

> I liked Paul's suggestion to define things in macros. It doesn't solve the problem of having to rerun all the
> code every time, but it does hide the data setup so it's not cluttering the remainder of my program. It
> likely has some other virtues too. Combining that with judicious use of temporary directories in which to
> save permanent sas datasets while I'm looking at them -- and/or possibly moving some of my data
> exploration to R -- I suspect I'll be able to reconstruct most of the workflow I'm used to. It'll just take
> some doing.

Sounds like a lot of work for very little benefit.  Why don't just
define the key presses yourself?  Something like...
(require 'ess-site)
(require 'ess-inf)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c C-p") 'ess-eval-paragraph-and-step)
(global-set-key [(control return)] 'ess-eval-region-or-line-and-step)

Rodney