I've been uninterested in Macs, but I'm trying to be more helpful with
student questions by using a MacBook Pro sometimes.  I installed Aquamacs,
which has ESS 13.05 built in.

I'm encouraging students to Aquamacs because there is some hope of
continuity across platforms if they learn Emacs on Windows and Linux.  But
it is not as uniform as I would like, since Aquamacs has fiddled the menus
and shortcut keys just enough to make this frustrating. Anyway...

Yesterday, a student said he preferred to use R.app because Aquamacs is
super slow while displaying long vectors of text values. Huh? I thought he
must have broken something in his Mac, but I see same.

Can you guess if this is a configuration problem, or a Mac OSX problem?

My working example, with system.time output at the end.

## Paul Johnson
## 2013-11-23

## Student reports that Macintosh Aquamacs has slow on-screen scrolling
## of large text arrays. So I've created this test

set.seed(23456)

y <-  lapply(1:50000, function(x) paste0(letters[1:(rpois(1, 10))],
collapse=""))

system.time(print(y))

## Aquamacs output (ESS 13.05)
## user  system elapsed
##  0.293   0.268  88.735

## R.app output
## user  system elapsed
##  1.552   0.028   1.575

Why is elapsed time so grossly in excess of user + system.

This reminded me of the problem in MS Command Shell when running C programs
compiled with gcc (back in the day). Viewing lots of printf statements was
very slow in Windows, not in Linux.

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin10.8.0 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

I don't know how to describe the Aquamacs version to you. The file it comes
from is on http://aquamacs.org:
Aquamacs-Emacs-2.5.dmg
In there I find:
ESS- 13.05

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science      Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504      Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas                 University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org               http://quant.ku.edu

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