[Rd] OS calls

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> P.S.
> >> sleep <- function(n) {system.call(paste("sleep ", n))} # pause for n seconds
> 
> >That's on my TODO list (but allowing sub-sec accuracy). KH suggested that
> >we hide names like that behind a .Sys call (but then he introduced getwd).
> >There is already at least one object called sleep (a dataset) in an R
> >package.
> 
> Changing these names is fine with me.

BTW, your sleep function is a really bad idea in a GUI environment (GNOME
or tcltk or even an X11 graphics device) as it blocks all GUI events.  The
version I use for the Windows port of xgobi sleeps for 500ms, then wakes up
and handles Windows events, goes back to sleep .... S-PLUS runs its
graphics devices (on Unix) in separate processes, but R does not.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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