[ESS] Interactive SAS mode hangs

[Erin Jonaitis]

Hi Rodney,

A colleague and I have done some more testing, and it does seem like what you suggest is true: things mostly work in ess-sas-interactive mode, but not in SAS mode. (They work a little differently, it seems, which may be par for the course as we're jumping ahead quite a few versions -- but I can now define a simple dataset and run a proc on it and get the expected output.)

I'm not sure what the distinction you're drawing (setup vs ESS itself) means for me in practice. What types of things should I be looking at in my setup to explore reasons for the failure of M-x SAS? What does M-x SAS depend on that ess-sas-interactive doesn't?

Also, a colleague drew my attention to the *Messages* buffer so I thought I'd try your first suggestion again (emacs -q, manually load ESS after setting a debug flag) and look there for error messages. I found one:
QuitError during redisplay (void-function with-silent-modifications)

Not sure what it means -- just throwing it out there in case anyone else recognizes it...
Erin

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sparapani, Rodney" <rsparapa using mcw.edu>
To: jonaitis using fstrf-wi.org
Cc: "ess-help" <ess-help using stat.math.ethz.ch>
Sent: Tuesday, September 1, 2015 11:23:33 AM
Subject: Re: Interactive SAS mode hangs

> What is the difference between ess-sas-interactive and M-x SAS? It seems like maybe when I run SAS via the
> latter process, ESS hangs every time I get an error message back from SAS or something. That's obviously
> not desired behavior in and of itself. Not being able to get through a datastep even when the hanging is not
> happening (i.e. in ess-sas-interactive) is also a problem, but might be a separate problem.
> 
> Erin

There are some subtle differences.  Mainly, M-x ess-sas-interactive
just tests all of the functionality needed to run M-x SAS.  If 
ess-sas-interactive works, then you know that something is wrong
with your setup rather than ESS itself.