From csr21 at cantab.net  Fri Aug 27 13:52:47 2010
From: csr21 at cantab.net (Christophe Rhodes)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:52:47 +0100
Subject: [Rd] introspective capabilities
Message-ID: <87iq2ws25s.fsf@cantab.net>

Hi,

Is there any way, from R code, to perform introspection as to where
certain names acquired their values?  The specific functionality I'm
looking for in this case is to be able to request my editor to view the
definition corresponding to a name in its original source location
(presuming for the moment that that location exists).  Other
functionality that I'm looking for is to identify where in the current
image a particular name is used -- "what functions use the value bound
to a particular name?"

The context for these questions, in case anyone is interested, is that I
am usually a Common Lisp programmer, and my programming environment for
that (SLIME) is what I'm used to.  R is sufficiently close to CL (the
discovery of withCallingHandlers/withRestarts was a pleasant surprise)
that I decided to experiment with implementing a SLIME backend for R --
and enough of it seems to work that I'm motivated to make it more
complete.  (The current state of the project is summarised at
<http://common-lisp.net/~crhodes/swankr/>).

Thanks,

Christophe



[Rd] introspective capabilities
Christophe Rhodes