[R] Scripting capabilities for R

Prof Brian D Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Wed May 30 08:58:30 CEST 2001


On Tue, 29 May 2001, Marc Feldesman wrote:

> I'm in the final week of teaching a course to beginners using R and
> S-Plus.  Since I forbade the students from using the "point-and-click"
> interface in S-Plus, they've become reasonably proficient at using the
> command line in both programs.
>
> Students really like the speed and ease-of-use of R for the vast majority
> of their projects.  I think they'd switch to R completely if they could get:
>
> 1)  trellis graphics (I've encouraged them to try grid and lattice).

Too early, I think. It is Devel software and fails in a lot of my
examples (sometime fails, but often does not give the intended output
which is hard for those who have not tried Trellis to know).  Not a
criticism: those of us who used Trellis 1 know how first versions go.

> 2)  the full complement of multiple comparisons capabilities found in
> Splus' multicomp.
> 3)  the more comprehensive discriminant analysis routines in S-Plus 2000
> and 6.0 - the ones with all the inferential testing as well as the
> classification results (they use the MASS routines now.  The S-Plus version
> has more options to study the separations themselves).

That would be a very small interest (I know it is yours) as for
classification there are almost always better ways.

[Historical note: S-PLUS users lived without all of those for many years,
and the last is only in 2000 and 6.0 I believe.  Already R has quite a bit
more than S-PLUS 3.4 of 1996, but also a few gaps relative to that.]

> 4)  Scripting capabilities.
>
> Of these 4, their priority is for R to have S-Plus scripting capability.  I
> realize that they can get this using Emacs with ESS, but I found it
> sufficiently daunting to teach rank beginners how to use R/S-Plus
> proficiently in 10 weeks that teaching them how to use Emacs/ESS at the
> same time scares the bejesus out of me.
>
> I haven't seen any mention of this as a development priority.  Is any of
> this on anyone's "to do" list?

Not really sure what you mean here.  R is itself a scripting language,
so in the most common use of `scripting' we have it.  Do you mean
the S-PLUS for Windows `script windows'?   If so which aspects?
We already have the ability to display code and to submit from it,
which is what was most asked for.  (Use Display file from the File menu,
highlight code, use Ctrl-V or the menus.)

Brian

-- 
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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