From ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de  Thu Feb 26 17:01:32 2004
From: ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de (Uwe Ligges)
Date: Thu Feb 26 17:00:32 2004
Subject: [Rd] Script editor for Windows GUI
In-Reply-To: <F5F5D1AC-6871-11D8-BB76-000A957CEFBA@math.uni-augsburg.de>
References: <8CBAA121CEB4D5118CB200508BB2BBEF0317EC7A@xmx8lonib.lonib.commerzbank.com>
	<F5F5D1AC-6871-11D8-BB76-000A957CEFBA@math.uni-augsburg.de>
Message-ID: <403E185C.5030300@statistik.uni-dortmund.de>

Simon Urbanek wrote:

> On Feb 26, 2004, at 11:58 AM, Marsland, John wrote:
> 
>> Is you project based upon the SJava package, because we have had lots of
>> problems with the callback interface?
> 
> 
> No, we are not using SJava for obvious reasons. I tried hard to fix it, 
> but for some platforms that is impossible w/o complete rewrite, so we 
> use our own interface now. The Java GUI approach has the advantage that 
> it also circumvents the event loop problems in that context.
> 
>> Would you consider releasing your work in progress under the GPL? We are
>> keen to avoid re-inventing things and its a long time until we are all at
>> UseR! - we could at the very least give some user feedback.
> 
> 
> I think this is a good idea, especially given the feedback I got since 
> the post :P. I'll talk to others in the developer team and maybe we 
> could leak a developer preview pre-pre-pre-alpha release in the next 
> weeks for those interested.
> 
>> On a slightly different tack, I have recently taken a look at Jython - an
>> implementation of Python in Java that produces byte code that runs on the
>> JVM. Combined with this there is a project called xoltar which aims to 
>> bring
>> functional programming to Python. This got me thinking that a R parser 
>> could
>> be written in Java for a core set of functionality allowing code and
>> packages written in "pure-R" to be compiled as byte code and run on 
>> the JVM.
>> Then one could call  the SJava package from Java to execute anything 
>> unusual
>> in R proper.... any thoughts?
> 
> 
> Good question - due to the amount of packages that use C/Fortran code I 
> had the impression that this sounds just too crazy. But I'm really keen 
> on getting some feedback on this, because technically, one of the CS 
> students here would enjoy doing something like that ...
> 
>> PS in terms of a script editor for R ... take a look at the JEdit project
>> which already supports R and S+ syntax highlighting. There is a plugin
>> called Sidekick which provides a framework for high-level 
>> language-specific
>> features, such as a structure tree, and code completion... it's all 
>> written
>> in Java so it could be extended to work with R.
> 
> 
> Does anyone here use JEdit? I had a really quick look at it and it looks 
> like a copy of Emacs ... which is a pity, because one could do much 
> better with Java ;).
> Re auto-completion: auto-completing keywords is ok, but how would one 
> include all the functions from all the packages? Especially since this 
> is runtime-dependent, because in the editor you don't even know which 
> packages are loaded at run-time ...

Simon,

right, building a list of (exported) functions from attached packages 
takes some time (not that dramatic, though).

Just an idea: You can maintain a second list containing information 
whether the first list is up to date by just checking which packages are 
attached, so you won't need to update the first list on each 
"auto-completion event".

Uwe


[Rd] Script editor for Windows GUI
Uwe Ligges