[ESS] [R] .Rd vs. .R, was: matrix multiplication

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Vitalie Spinu <spinuvit at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Thu, 6 Dec 2012 23:27:50 +0100 writes:

    >>> Kasper Daniel Hansen <kasperdanielhansen at gmail.com>
    >>> on Thu, 6 Dec 2012 16:15:09 -0500 wrote:

    >> This is really useful to refer to other peoples home directories.
    >> Really nice and useful if you work with other people on the same
    >> system.  Especially since at my institution, our home dirs are not
    >> just /home/khansen or /Users/khansen, but rather something like
    >> /home/DEPARTMENT/STATUS/khansen
    >> with STATUS being student/faculty/etc  And since I would with people
    >> with different statuses in different departments, fully expanding
    >> their homedir path is ... irritating.  And several people I share
    >> scripts with don't user ESS, so they freely user the ~username syntax.

    > Yeh, I see now. Indeed, looks like a very useful feature that I was not
    > aware of. 

    > If I run R from emacs shell, the expansion works. So, indeed, it boils
    > down to --no-readline.

    > I have tried M-x R without --no-readline and it works fine. It was added
    > long-long back in
   
    > ╭──────── #4628 ─ /home/vitoshka/ESS/git/lisp/ChangeLog ──
    > │ 
    > │ Tue Aug 18 10:28:22 1998  Martin Maechler  <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
    > │ 
    > │ 	* essd-r.el (R): add the "--no-readline" argument to r-start-args.
    > ╰──────── #4631 ─

    > My guess is that this is not needed anymore. Martin?

Yes, that could well be the case, i.e., that emacs + comint has
improved well during those years (well only 14 years ;-) that's not
so long long back, given the history of ESS and its predecessor
S-mode ... ;-)

At the time, readline would occasionally interfere; with its own
completion; notably how it treated the [TAB] character as
triggering completion etc.
IIRC, the worst effect was when people cut and pasted R code
(into *R*) which contained [TAB]s.

[Additionally: --no-readline makes the REPL {the famous Read-Eval-Print-Loop}
 slightly faster, though probably not noticably anymore
 nowadays].

I'll make it into a customizable option which is off by default,
so if bad side effects are found, the user can easily change
back to the old default.

Martin