[Rd] Script editor for Windows GUI

[Simon Urbanek]

On Feb 26, 2004, at 11:58 AM, Marsland, John wrote:

> Is you project based upon the SJava package, because we have had lots 
> of
> problems with the callback interface?

No, we are not using SJava for obvious reasons. I tried hard to fix it, 
but for some platforms that is impossible w/o complete rewrite, so we 
use our own interface now. The Java GUI approach has the advantage that 
it also circumvents the event loop problems in that context.

> Would you consider releasing your work in progress under the GPL? We 
> are
> keen to avoid re-inventing things and its a long time until we are all 
> at
> UseR! - we could at the very least give some user feedback.

I think this is a good idea, especially given the feedback I got since 
the post :P. I'll talk to others in the developer team and maybe we 
could leak a developer preview pre-pre-pre-alpha release in the next 
weeks for those interested.

> On a slightly different tack, I have recently taken a look at Jython - 
> an
> implementation of Python in Java that produces byte code that runs on 
> the
> JVM. Combined with this there is a project called xoltar which aims to 
> bring
> functional programming to Python. This got me thinking that a R parser 
> could
> be written in Java for a core set of functionality allowing code and
> packages written in "pure-R" to be compiled as byte code and run on 
> the JVM.
> Then one could call  the SJava package from Java to execute anything 
> unusual
> in R proper.... any thoughts?

Good question - due to the amount of packages that use C/Fortran code I 
had the impression that this sounds just too crazy. But I'm really keen 
on getting some feedback on this, because technically, one of the CS 
students here would enjoy doing something like that ...

> PS in terms of a script editor for R ... take a look at the JEdit 
> project
> which already supports R and S+ syntax highlighting. There is a plugin
> called Sidekick which provides a framework for high-level 
> language-specific
> features, such as a structure tree, and code completion... it's all 
> written
> in Java so it could be extended to work with R.

Does anyone here use JEdit? I had a really quick look at it and it 
looks like a copy of Emacs ... which is a pity, because one could do 
much better with Java ;).
Re auto-completion: auto-completing keywords is ok, but how would one 
include all the functions from all the packages? Especially since this 
is runtime-dependent, because in the editor you don't even know which 
packages are loaded at run-time ...

---
Simon Urbanek
Department of computer oriented statistics and data analysis
University of Augsburg
Universitätsstr. 14
86135 Augsburg
Germany

Tel: +49-821-598-2236
Fax: +49-821-598-2200

Simon.Urbanek at Math.Uni-Augsburg.de
http://simon.urbanek.info