[R] New project: littler for GNU R

[Duncan Murdoch]

Jeffrey Horner wrote:
> Seth Falcon wrote:
>   
>> Jeffrey Horner <jeff.horner at vanderbilt.edu> writes:
>>     
>
> [...]
>
>   
>>> littler will install into /usr/local/bin by default, so I don't think
>>> there's a clash with the Mac binary provided by CRAN, right?
>>>       
>> It depends what you mean by clash :-)
>>
>> If both are on the PATH, then you get the first one, I suspect, when
>> running either 'R' or 'r'.  I haven't tested this bit yet, but on my
>> OS X laptop I can invoke a new R session using either 'R' or 'r'
>> (using an R built from source, not the R GUI app thingie).
>>     
>
> Good point, but the executable path can be named absolutely in hash-bang 
> scripts. Relative paths work as well with the use of '/usr/bin/env 
> program' as is described in the littler announcement, but then you don't
> get to pass arguments to 'program', just to the hash-bang script.
>
>   
>> So IMO, a different name or an integration into the R script in some
>> way would be a big improvement.
>>     
>
> But I'd like to know why there's an R script in the first place. Why not 
> just an executable as on windows?
>   

There need to be (at least) two separate executables:  on Windows they 
are R.exe which invokes Rterm.exe. The reason for this is that "R CMD 
foo" invokes the script foo, it doesn't run Rterm at all.  On 
Unix-alikes the first is a script rather than an exe.

The reason the first is a script on Unix is that whoever wrote it 
preferred the sh script language to C for handling the things it needs 
to do, but that's not generally available in Windows, so we were stuck 
with C.

Duncan Murdoch
>   
>> 'r' is cute, but going down the road of tools with the same name
>> except for caps leads to confusion (for me).  For example, R CMD
>> build/INSTALL still catches me up after a number of years.
>>     
>
> That's a different problem than case-sensitivity. The word 'build' must 
> have had a different semantic than INSTALL, and I'm not sure why one was 
> all caps and the other isn't.
>
> Jeff
>