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

[Frederico Muñoz]

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