From smckinney at bccrc.ca  Fri Mar 22 02:08:51 2013
From: smckinney at bccrc.ca (Steven McKinney)
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:08:51 -0700
Subject: [Rd] Depreciating partial matching
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org]
> On Behalf Of Andreas Leha
> Sent: March-21-13 3:33 PM
> To: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Depreciating partial matching
> 
> Terry Therneau <therneau at mayo.edu> writes:
> 
> > On 03/21/2013 10:00 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
> >>>> I would think that the ability to hit the Tab key to trigger name
> >>>> >>  completion in your R GUI makes partial matching almost useless.
> The
> >>>> >>  avantage of interactive completion in the GUI is that you
> immediately
> >>>> >>  see the result of the partial matching. So you get the best of
> both
> >>>> >>  worlds: no need to type long variable names in full, but no traps
> when a
> >>>> >>  match is not what you would expect.
> >>>> >>  >>  Doesn't this suit your use case?
> >>> >  Good point.  This works well at the command line.  However, not
> >>> > when interacting between emacs and R in the way I do.  For
> >>> > reproducability I use and emacs file that is being corrected and
> >>> > massaged with chunks submitted to R; at the end I have a clean
> >>> > record of how the result was obtained.
> >>> >
> >> If this is really true (that ESS doesn't complete in R files) then
> >> this seems more like a bug (or wish?) report for ESS - other editors
> >> correctly support code completion in R documents - after all this is
> >> a feature of R, so they don't need to re-invent the wheel.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Simon
> > If you are running the R process inside ESS then there is matching --
> > it is R.  Doing this, keeping a log file, and then post-hoc cleaning
> > up all the cruft from that file is one way to keep documentation.  But
> > since for my analyses the number of models/plots/etc that turn out to
> > be detours or dead ends on the way to a solution is larger than the
> > worthwhile part (typos alone are lots larger) I prefer to keep the
> > file(s) as their own buffers and submit bits of them to an R process
> > either by cut-paste to a separate window or ess-submit to an inferior
> > process.  Emacs can't do name completion in that case.  Nor could it
> > do so in an Sweave file, unless you were to keep a live R process in
> > hand to pre-test chunks as you wrote them.  (One could reasonably
> > argue that when one gets the Sweave stage the names should be
> > expanded.)
> 
> Not true (any more?).
> 
> ,----
> | ESS[S] is the mode for editing S language files. This mode handles:
> |
> | [...]
> |  -  completion of object names and file names.
> `----
> from
> http://ess.r-project.org/Manual/ess.html#ESS_0028S_0029_002d_002dEditing-
> files
> 
> 
> ESS can do completion of functions, object names, and also
> list/data.frame elements in *both* the inferior R buffer as well as in
> the .R file.
> 
> [...]

Looking forward to that!  But it is not working at present.
The link above points to the development version ess-13 which
I downloaded using svn export (I got version 13.03, running
on a Mac with emacs 24.3).  

Completion of object names works in the inferior ESS buffer 
but not yet in an ESS buffer ( .R file).

Steven McKinney


> 
> - Andreas
> 
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[Rd] Depreciating partial matching
Steven McKinney