[ESS] ESS confused about newest R

[Kevin R. Coombes]

To clarify, I don't ever start R (as Rterm) from a  command line prompt 
on Windows. As a result, I really don't bother to put the R installation 
location into the PATH environment variable, since I don't want to have 
to update it every time a new version is released. (For the same reason, 
I don't want to have to manually set "inferior-ess-r-program" and have 
to remember to update it with new releases.)

I have desktop icons for the RGui. I can see the version number and name 
on those icons if I want to start R that way; those all work. I also 
have no problem using RStudio, which continues to be successful in 
automatically finding the newest versions. The only problem is with ESS 
inside of emacs, and it started with version 4.2.0, which coincided with 
dropping the creation of 32-bit R versions on Windows.

Further, ESS/R does *find *all versions of R on my system. I know this 
because it creates separate startup commands (such as R-4.2.0-64bit). 
That part that fails is the code in the file "ess-r-mode.el" that is 
supposed to find the newest R from the list of all available versions.

On 6/29/2022 9:57 AM, Shreyas Ragavan wrote:
>
>
> I wanted to add a suggestion here that when or if you add multiple R versions from non-standard paths to your PATH environment variable in Windows (to enable Emacs or any program to find the R executable) - it is important to make sure the desired version of R is the First path. Programs will stop looking for the executable once it is found, and if an earlier R version is found before the desired version - that is what would start up.
>
>> Your (from description) Windows system appears confused about where to find
>> R, and doubly so as a 32/64 bit convention is dead, and there is only 64bit.
>>
>> On operating systems that use $PATH you can _always_ just point to a working
>> R by pointing RHOME/bin so that the right R is found. It has been years since
>> I worked on Windows but it got the R I wanted when I told ESS in no uncertain
>> terms which one I wanted. It seems to me you would be well advised to try the
>> same if you have confusing choice of multiple R versions to confuse ESS with.
>

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