[Rd] Depreciating partial matching

[Andreas Leha]

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.

[...]

- Andreas