From jeroen.ooms at stat.ucla.edu  Tue Jul 24 11:15:22 2012
From: jeroen.ooms at stat.ucla.edu (Jeroen Ooms)
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:15:22 +0200
Subject: [Rd] On RObjectTables
In-Reply-To: <CAOQ5NydxVJG4gHxk60=_xLwVUVvN+t7N+CHwwV=p=a7MUg9yJA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CABFfbXv480ciNg3vphvwwvZvX03vvWABGRRT8a7SgRn25wPXgg@mail.gmail.com>
	<alpine.LFD.2.02.1207200928200.1918@nokomis.stat.uiowa.edu>
	<CAOQ5NydxVJG4gHxk60=_xLwVUVvN+t7N+CHwwV=p=a7MUg9yJA@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CABFfbXtUCTpFdYs2AXToXx6_+XNdZBE_Z1c-cEopdVr4C+DjMg@mail.gmail.com>

Maybe it is worth considering to document this functionality a bit
more, or expose some wrappers in R? It's a bit obscure right now,
which seems both dangerous in terms of maintenance and a missed
opportunity (especially if people are already building on it).





On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 2:06 AM, Michael Lawrence
<lawrence.michael at gene.com> wrote:
>
> Luke,
>
> Please keep me advised on this, because the Qt interfaces heavily rely on the ObjectTables (btw, it has worked great for my use cases).
>
> Michael
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 7:32 AM, <luke-tierney at uiowa.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I believe everyone who has worked on the relevant files has tried to
>> maintain this functionality, but as it seems to get used and tested
>> very little I can't be sure it is functional at this point. The
>> facility in its current form does complicate the internal code and
>> limit some experiments we might otherwise do, so I would not be
>> surprised if it was at least substantially changed in the next year or
>> two.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> luke
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
>>
>>> I was wondering if anyone knows more about the state of RObjectTables. This
>>> largely undocumented functionality was introduced by Duncan around 2002
>>> somewhere and enables you create an environment where the contents are
>>> dynamically queried by R through a hook function. It is mentioned in R
>>> Internals and ?attach. This functionality is quite powerful and allows you
>>> to e.g. offload a big database of R objects to disk, yet use them as if
>>> they were in your workspace. The recent RProtoBuf package also uses some of
>>> this functionality to dynamically lookup proto definitions.
>>>
>>> I would like to do something similar, but I am not sure if support for this
>>> functionality will be or has been discontinued. The RObjectTables package
>>> is no longer available on OmegaHat and nothing has not been mentioned on
>>> the mailing lists for about 5 years. I found an old version of the package
>>> no github which seems to work, but as far as I understand, the package
>>> still needs the hooks from within R to work. So if this functionality is
>>> actually unsupported and might be removed at some point, I should probably
>>> not invest in it.
>>>
>>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Luke Tierney
>> Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
>> Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
>> University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
>> Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
>>    Actuarial Science
>> 241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney at uiowa.edu
>> Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
>>
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>



[Rd] On RObjectTables
Jeroen Ooms