[ESS] Failure to parse long R functions when ess-eval-visibly nil

[Andreas Leha]

Hi Vitalie,

Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit using gmail.com> writes:
> This is a known problem with ess-remote. I have no idea why the characters are
> lost. It's some emacs shell bug which I couldn't figure out last time I looked
> into it. This problem is almost impossible to reproduce consistently and debug
> properly.
>
> I suggest you stick with tramp. This problem never occurs with tramp and you
> have full set of ESS features on remotes, while ess-remote provides only a very
> limited functionality.
>

I have reported this problem a while back, too [1].

I'd also recommend using tramp where possible.  I just want to mention
again, that to my knowledge that won't work with screen/tmux sessions on
the remote side.  So, that advice won't help for most of my remote work.

(Most of my remote sessions live inside a screen session, because my
remote sessions are typically long and computationally intensive and
often even initiate submissions to a cluster.  If they were not, I would
run that on the local machine.)



Thanks,
Andreas


[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.ess.general/8690



>>> On Wed, Oct 07 2015 13:47, Robert McGehee wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>> I'm having an issue in which sufficiently long and complex functions will
>> fail to correctly evaluate in R (with e.g. ess-eval-function) if
>> ess-eval-visibly is nil rather than true. Instead I receive syntax errors
>> part way through the function that seem to indicate that a line or
>> character was accidentally dropped during the ess eval making the function
>> un-parsable. If I turn on visibility (ess-eval-visibly t), the problem
>> disappears but the evaluation takes a long time due to latency on my setup.
>> Moreover, the problem isn't perfectly reproducible as the syntax error will
>> occur somewhat at random. However, with a sufficiently long and complex
>> function (e.g. 300+ lines) I'm virtually guaranteed an error.
>
>> Unfortunately, my setup is likely unusual so I'm not sure if this is an ESS
>> error. However, I wanted to post in case anyone had any ideas on a fix
>> (besides just turning ess-eval-visibly to true).
>
>> For my setup, I run emacs 24.5.1 on my local (USA) Windows box via Cygwin
>> and have ESS 15.09 installed from source. I connect to a remote (European)
>> Linux server via emacs shell and ssh, then start R (3.2.2) and start
>> ESS-mode with M-x ess-remote. I run emacs locally rather than on the server
>> side as I'm connecting to a server across the Atlantic ocean and latency is
>> too high for X11 forwarding. Additionally, given the latency, I have to
>> wait a considerable amount of time to eval an R function visibly, whereas
>> it happens extremely fast if I turn off visible eval. Thus, I'd much prefer
>> a working non-visible eval.
>
>> Here's a simple function I used to generate the syntax error. It has the
>> advantage of nearly guaranteeing a parsing failure if any character is
>> missing.
>
>> a <- function(x) {
>>     if (a(b,"c"))
>>         x <- d(e(f(g,"H"),"I"),"J",k="L")
>>     if (a(b,"c"))
>>         x <- d(e(f(g,"H"),"I"),"J",k="L")
>> <...snip... repeated ~300 times>
>>     if (a(b,"c"))
>>         x <- d(e(f(g,"H"),"I"),"J",k="L")
>> }
>
>> ## Here is the error I got indicating two closing parentheses "))" were
>> dropped during eval:
>> Error: unexpected symbol in:
>> "    if (a(b,"c"
>>         x"
>
>> (Possibly unrelated, if any line has two consecutive tab characters, then
>> ESS will actually print the contents of the home directory of the remote
>> server, which is exceptionally weird.)
>
>> Please let me know if anyone has any thoughts on this. Otherwise I'll just
>> turn ess-eval-visibly back to true.
>
>> Thanks!
>> Robert
>
>> PS.
>> Here is the relevant portion of my .emacs file:
>
>> (require 'cl)
>> (load "cc-mode")
>> (load "compile")
>
>> (require 'ess-site)
>> (setq comint-scroll-to-bottom-on-input t)
>> (setq comint-scroll-to-bottom-on-output t)
>> (setq ess-eval-visibly nil)
>> (setq ess-nuke-trailing-whitespace-p t)
>> (setq-default ess-directory "/tmp/")
>> (define-key key-translation-map [?\C-h] [?\C-?])
>
>> (transient-mark-mode t)
>> (setq display-time-day-and-date t)
>> (display-time-mode 1)
>> (setq visible-bell t)
>> (setq undo-outer-limit 100000)
>
>> (setq line-number-display-limit nil)
>> (setq line-number-display-limit-width 2000)
>> (setq column-number-mode t)
>> (require 'paren)
>> (if (fboundp 'show-paren-mode) (show-paren-mode 1))
>
>> (setenv "PID" nil)
>> (put 'upcase-region 'disabled nil)
>> (add-hook 'ess-mode-hook
>>       (lambda ()
>>         (ess-set-style 'C++ 'quiet)
>>         (add-hook 'local-write-file-hooks
>>               (lambda ()
>>             (ess-nuke-trailing-whitespace)))))
>> (setq truncate-partial-width-windows nil)
>
>> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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