[Rd] R-devel Digest, Vol 100, Issue 28

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 29/06/2011 1:44 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 29/06/2011 1:09 PM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
> >
> >  On 29.06.2011 13:41, John Maindonald wrote:
> >  >   I get the same style of path as Hadley.  This is on Windows 7 Home Premium with SP1.
> >  >   I start R by clicking on the R-2.31.0 icon.
> >  >
> >  >   I'd assumed that it was a change that came with R-2.13.0!
> >  >   (On 32-bit Windows XP, which I have just checked, I do indeed get the 8.3 paths.)
> >  >
> >  >>   R.home()
> >  >   [1] "C:/Programs/R/R-2.13.0"
> >
> >
> >  No, you got the same as Duncan: This is 8.3 compatible.
>
>
> Yes, that's right.  The documentation is pretty inaccurate.  What
> actually is supposed to happen is that you get the actual path, with
> forward slashes in it, unless it contains spaces:  then you get the 8.3
> version.  So John's path has no spaces, and doesn't get converted to
> 8.3.  True 8.3 would also have uppercase PROGRAMS, and only one dot in
> R-2.13.0 (I forget how that is converted).

I've now clarified the help page.  R.home() just looks up the 
environment variable R_HOME, and then possibly adds some subdir to it.
If your front end (e.g. Hadley's rj/Eclipse setup) doesn't initialize 
R_HOME properly, then you'll get whatever it put there.  You can also 
mess with it using Sys.setenv(R_HOME="junk").

Duncan Murdoch