[ESS] ESS[SAS]: experience, fixes, and starting questions

[Sparapani, Rodney]

Hi Frederico:

Responding to your questions…

1. Is fixing/adding this support to ESS something desirable, or better
left out of the main tree?”

We are accepting patches.  But, iESS[SAS] is more or less historically frozen at this point since it’s a dead-end as far as features go.

2. You mentioned "little interactive support relative to R": I would be
very interested in some examples, if possible.

In R, you can accomplish a lot of debugging interactively by inspecting an object,
printing/plotting it, etc.  Since SAS does not have objects, you really can’t do much.
Also, the focus of SAS is more-so on data sets (since there really is nothing else).
Permanent SAS data set can be interacted with by PROC FSVIEW that is supported
by ESS[SAS] with F9 (for ess-sas-global-unix-keys).
--
Rodney Sparapani, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, He/Him/His
Vice President, Wisconsin Chapter of the American Statistical Association
Institute for Health and Equity, Division of Biostatistics
Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Campus

If this is outside of working hours, then please respond when convenient.

From: Sparapani, Rodney <rsparapa using mcw.edu>
Date: Thursday, February 1, 2024 at 12:54 PM
To: Sparapani, Rodney <rsparapa using mcw.edu>
Subject: Re: [ESS] ESS[SAS]: experience, fixes, and starting questions
Hello,

Thank you for your answer.

"Sparapani, Rodney via ESS-help" <ess-help using r-project.org> writes:
> iESS[SAS] goes way back to the beginning of ESS.  At that time, interactive
> SAS
> was thought to be a good idea. However, batch SAS was quickly adopted as a
> more prudent approach given that there was comparatively little interactive
> support relative to R.

This is very interesting, I wasn't aware of it. I didn't even try batch
before your answer since my own background is not with SAS, but with
Emacs (ESS+R , Elpy+Python), where I use the interactive mode
extensively.

I'll give the batch mode a try, but now that I've made iESS work I have
a couple of different questions:

1. Is fixing/adding this support to ESS something desirable, or better
left out of the main tree?
2. You mentioned "little interactive support relative to R": I would be
very interested in some examples, if possible.

My own usage of the interactive mode includes e.g. using it with
polyline to a similar approach to Rnw, but with SAS, and for that I end
up using a REPL approach to develop things.

The LSP server support is something orthogonal to this, but I'm also
checking to what extend there are some overlaps (my experience has been
great so far, using it with SAS-mode).


> And the reason the F-keys are NOT turned on globally
> by default is due to the GNU elisp standards that do not allow it.  So you
> have
> to turn on your F-keys by yourself.  I do it like this in ~/.emacs
>
> (setq ess-sas-global-unix-keys t)
> (require 'ess-site)

Thank you, I had the ess-sas-global-unix-keys thing done but it was at
the wrong place, it now works as expected.

Best regards,

Frederico Muñoz

From: Sparapani, Rodney <rsparapa using mcw.edu>
Date: Monday, January 29, 2024 at 9:23 AM
To: ess-help using r-project.org <ess-help using r-project.org>
Subject: [ESS] ESS[SAS]: experience, fixes, and starting questions
Hi Federico:

iESS[SAS] goes way back to the beginning of ESS.  At that time, interactive SAS
was thought to be a good idea.  However, batch SAS was quickly adopted as a
more prudent approach given that there was comparatively little interactive
support relative to R.  And the reason the F-keys are NOT turned on globally
by default is due to the GNU elisp standards that do not allow it.  So you have
to turn on your F-keys by yourself.  I do it like this in ~/.emacs

(setq ess-sas-global-unix-keys t)
(require 'ess-site)

--
Rodney Sparapani, Associate Professor of Biostatistics, He/Him/His
Vice President, Wisconsin Chapter of the American Statistical Association
Institute for Health and Equity, Division of Biostatistics
Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Campus

If this is outside of working hours, then please respond when convenient.

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