Re: [R] What happenes with R-gnome? Suggestions

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Subject: Re: [R] What happenes with R-gnome? Suggestions
From: A.J. Rossini (rossini@blindglobe.net)
Date: Sat 02 Sep 2000 - 10:05:18 EST 

Message-ID: <87lmxbmzep.fsf@jeeves.blindglobe.net>

(I'll comment on this, being the defacto and hence currently very
blameworthy lead for ESS).

>>>>> "NT" == Nels Tomlinson <tomlinso@purdue.edu> writes:

NT> On this second point, there is a sub-issue: we already have a
NT> wonderful programming environment for R: ESS. I think that if
NT> we do implement a GUI, it should either be integrated with
NT> emacs, or at least not make it harder to use emacs.

That has been considered -- at least a GUI similar to the pull-down
variant that Minitab/SPSS/etc have (it wouldn't be too hard -- we
"know" the objects, etc, and note that we already have object
completion, if we had object discovery, we could actually classify
it).

NT> Third, as mentioned above, we really need a lot of things yet
NT> in our programming language. One thing we need (?) is
NT> something like an object editor in ESS. That is, it would be

Some of this is in the distant future plans. We have reached the
point that we really need some work on the general IDE capabilities
(if you've used JDE for programming Java, you slowly realize just how
powerful Emacs really could be for statistical analysis...).

Some issues that might help include speedbar and imenu support (which
exists in various forms but isn't included) and templates (which I'm
not convinced are efficient). Imenu/speedbar support would provide
object-browser capabilities, which if done well (I've got ideas :-(),
would be better than what S-PLUS 2k currently has, IF you follow a
prescribed environment for development (and that "IF" is really a
hard and fast "IFF").

On a separate tact -- GNOME is cool; it's one of the few desktops I've
enjoyed using recently, but I'm very leery of R-GNOME. The big issue
really is cross-platform compatibility, and most of the decent Unix
GUI APIs aren't easily cross-platform, sigh... (and yes, and being a
major unix bigot, it's the painful truth).

best,
-tony 

-- 
A.J. Rossini				Rsrch. Asst. Prof. of Biostatistics
BlindGlobe Networks (home/default)	rossini@blindglobe.net	
UW Biostat/Center for AIDS Research	rossini@biostat.washington.edu	
FHCRC/SCHARP/HIV Vaccine Trials Net	rossini@scharp.org

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