[R] Re: GUIs

[Prof Brian Ripley]

> Date: Tue, 9 May 2000 10:25:24 +0100 (BST)
> From: Dave Lucy <D.J.Lucy at Bradford.ac.uk>
> To: r-help <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
> Subject: [R] Re: GUIs
> 
> 
> > > > formalities from one time to the next. So they get scared of the
> > > > prospect of staring empty-minded at the R prompt. 
> 
> > Remember that there is product `not unlike R' that does have an extensive
> > menu/dialogs front-end, so the pros and cons of GUI to S are not
> > unexplored.  And I am in favour of one for R, but I do not give it high
> > priority.  (It really would be man-months of work.)  We would need to sort
> > out a cross-platform GUI interface design and have that running first or
> > one ends up with a Windows-only GUI (as happened with all the examples
> > above).
> 
> Personally I'm against GUI's - particularly for teaching, but can
> appreciate why people who are occasional users may wish to have one. I
> think that what we are really describing here is an assisted batch type
> processing, where one gets menu items more as a reminder as to what sort
> of things are availible for each task.
> 
> One of the easiest interfaces I have seen was the old DOS SPSS (V4 I
> think) which had menus which when an item was selected would produce a
> dialogue for the function allowing the user to enter parameters. Upon
> closure the dialogue would shut pasting the appropriate command line into
> the scratch-pad. The scratch-pad would then act as a batch file. This led
> to an easy uptake of batch file composition. As I remember there was also
> an object listing from which objects could be selected as function
> dialogue items.
> 
> Any thoughts,

That's exactly what I am working on for Rgui for 1.1.0, as a demo
of how to use the menu/dialog system.  A completed menu item submits
a command that appears in the console and gets saved in the session log
(which can be saved in a separate file).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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