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

[Vitalie Spinu]

Sam Steingold posted a complete working solution for how to make direct
connection with xterm + ssh + screen + R from emacs a while ago. The thread
should be easy to find.

 Vitalie

>> On Wed, Oct 07 2015 21:25, Andreas Leha wrote:

> 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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