[R] Tcl Tk table

[James Wettenhall]

On 26 Apr 2004, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> > As noted previously, in R >= 1.8.0 tclArray() is a better way
> > to handle Tcl arrays. 
> 
> Doesn't really help with tagging though (or does it?)

Not that I know of.  I just thought I'd point out to anyone 
still using .Tcl("set tclarray...") or whatever, that while they 
may have copied that from one of my examples previously, now I 
would recommend using the official tclArray() interface in the 
tcltk package which does some nice stuff that the user shouldn't 
have to worry about (see tclArray() and tclVar() functions).
 
> BTW, .Tk.ID sneaked in again... I wonder what is the cleanest way of
> doing this stuff. This works (inserting "list" to compensate for
> absence of tktable):

Oops.  Sorry about the unnecessary .Tk.ID()  

It is very nice having all of the wrapper functions to take 
care of quoting-hell etc. etc. but at the moment there are a 
lot more Tcl/Tk examples and documentation in pure Tcl/Tk than 
R-Tcl/Tk, so often, I firstly ask "How would I do this in 
pure Tcl/Tk?" and then I translate, so that's why using the
.Tk.ID() function feels quite natural to me.  

If I teach myself to avoid .Tk.ID() as much as possible in 
order to improve my R-Tcl/Tk coding style, should I also try to 
avoid tclvalue() as much as possible?  (I'm pretty sure the 
answer is "No".)  They seem similar in that they both convert 
a Tcl/Tk object into a string, but while .Tk.ID() is 
unnecessary/wrong for the example in this thread, tclvalue() 
is still necessary for this:
foo <- tclVar("one two")
tkmessageBox(message=foo)           # Doesn't work :(
tkmessageBox(message=tclvalue(foo)) # Does work :)

So this analogy is my current excuse for mistakenly 
using .Tk.ID() when it isn't needed.

Sometimes I get an error from tcl which I don't really 
understand, and the first question I ask myself is "What 
would the Tcl/Tk command look like if I had written it in pure 
Tcl/Tk?" or more precisely, "What is the Tcl/Tk command being 
sent to Tcl/Tk from R?" 

It seems that this second question was slightly easier to answer 
with the old R-Tcl/Tk interface, where you could use .Tcl.args() 
etc.  .Tcl.args.objv() is very similar but it doesn't look as 
much like a Tcl command as it did with .Tcl.args(), so if you 
wanted to ask a question to someone who only speaks pure Tcl/Tk 
and just gave them the output of .Tcl.args.objv(), they might be 
a little confused (see below).  And if you just looked at the 
tkcmd() function's R code to try to work out what the 
corresponding Tcl/Tk command would be for an R-Tcl/Tk command, 
you may at first think that there's no way to tell within 
R, because .Tcl.objv() calls an external C function. But in 
fact .Tcl.args.objv() actually tells you quite a lot:

> .Tcl.args.objv("wm","title",tt,"The Title")
[[1]]
<Tcl> wm 

[[2]]
<Tcl> title 

[[3]]
<Tcl> .3 

[[4]]
<Tcl> The Title 

Of course, a nicer solution than making it easy to find the 
corresponding Tcl/Tk command so you can go running to the Tcl/Tk 
community for help, is to have the R-Tcl/Tk user base contribute 
to its documentation so eventually it is better than the pure 
Tcl/Tk documentation or the Perl/Tk documentation!!!

Where should we start?  What can I do?

Regards,
James