From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Sat Oct 15 18:51:09 2005
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 12:51:09 -0400
Subject: [Rd] [R-gui]  R GUI considerations
In-Reply-To: <971536df0510150756w3021b278s4df4a166853e5ed6@mail.gmail.com>
References: <4350FB09.3020503@sciviews.org>	<971536df0510150649k22bdf047uf2ac6106bea1120b@mail.gmail.com>	<43510F28.6020209@sciviews.org>
	<971536df0510150756w3021b278s4df4a166853e5ed6@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4351337D.7020604@stats.uwo.ca>

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> I notice that there is some discussion on this at
> http://developer.r-project.org/ under the links involving the
> word threading.  Thus using the facilities of another language
> seems to be one approach and building such facilities into
> R itself another.
> 
> On 10/15/05, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> 
>>Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>>>The preferred solutions in the post all seem to involve another language:
>>>
>>>- tcl to use tk
>>>- Python to use wxWidgets
>>>
>>>and other solutions mentioned also seem to involve other languages:
>>>
>>>- Visual Basic
>>>- Java (Swing?)
>>>
>>>Is there some key missing feature in R with regards to GUIs
>>>that requires interposing another language?

I think the Java/C++ style of object oriented programming is 
particularly well suited to writing GUIs.  GUIs contain a lot of objects 
that need to maintain their state, and that need to respond to messages. 
  The different kinds of objects have a lot in common with one another, 
and also some specific differences.

You don't need an OOP language to write a GUI (the Windows Rgui is 
written in C, for example), but it makes things easier.

You can write R in that style, but it's not the standard style to use, 
so it's not particularly easy.

Duncan Murdoch



[Rd] [R-gui] R GUI considerations
Duncan Murdoch