[ESS] ESS[SAS] , ess-sas-submit, and submit-sas

[Rodney Sparapani]

Hi Erik:

I had a little trouble replying so I'm making the unusual choice of top-posting.
No flames please :o)  The two methods of batch submission have a little history. 
submit-sas came first from sas-mode.  But, when I started using ESS back in '98
or so, I didn't like the behavior of waiting for the job to finish.  I've been
working on medium to large databases so the jobs could take anywhere from many
minutes to days.  I didn't realize that you could press C-g to avoid the wait
which has come up on the list with respect to ESS[R] recently.  So, Rich and
I re-invented the ESS SAS batch functionality and ess-sas-submit was invented.  
My thinking was that no
one would ever want to wait for a SAS job to end, but you have proved me wrong!  
As far as errors go, the return code is reflected in the mini-buffer notifications
and we have provided F5 to goto the .log and the first error message, if any.
In any case, all of the legacy sas-mode functionality is basically unchanged so you
are free to use that if you prefer.  However, most of it has not been tested
recently.  In fact, iESS[SAS] hasn't worked for me in the last few versions of
ESS.  Of course, patches are welcome.

Thanks,

Rodney


Hello -

I've used ESS together with R for several years and found it quite 
useful.  I've lately had to use ESS together with SAS.

I downloaded the latest ess (5.2.12) and installed it.  I'm using XEmacs 
under Linux (Red Hat Enterprise 4).

I then edited ess-site.el to provide the "local UNIX keys" to my SAS 
mode in XEmacs.  This is the mode that uses F3 to submit a SAS job to SAS.

It seems to me (and I may have some details incorrect) that there are 
two separate methods for submitting a batch SAS job to SAS in ESS.  The 
first (and what happens when I press F3) is called ess-sas-submit, found 
in file essa-sas.el.  I would like my minibuffer to tell me when the SAS 
job has completed, but using this function it simply reports "Done sas 
cda -rsasuser &" immediately upon pushing F3.  Upon examining the 
*shell* buffer, it becomes clear that this "Done ..." output is actually 
the result of the previous command because the "&" was used to put it in 
the background.  Changing the ess-sas-submit-post-command to remove the 
"&" results in similar behavior, the result of a "cd" command is then 
seen in the minibuffer upon submitting a SAS job.

The other method to submit a batch job to SAS from ESS is called 
submit-sas, found in essl-sas.el.  While that and other functions are 
defined in that file, they don't seem to be used.  I think I would 
prefer submit-sas to ess-sas-submit because the minibuffer tells me when 
SAS exits, and also if there were any errors.  However, ess doesn't seem 
to have an option to use submit-sas over ess-sas-submit.  I can, and 
have, bound a key to do submit-sas for me.

My question is, is there a reason ess-sas-submit is preferred over 
submit-sas (there very well may be), and why isn't there an option to 
choose between these two methods?

Perhaps because of some configuration on my system, ess-sas-submit isn't 
working properly with my minibuffer.  Have users who use SAS with ESS 
experienced this same behavior?

Thanks for any insight,
Erik Iverson