[Rd] Enhancement request: anonymous connections

[Seth Falcon]

On  1 Jan 2006, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:
> However, that just isn't how connections are documented in the Green
> Book (referenced on all the relevant help pages, so required
> reading) and getConnection() allows you to create an R object
> pointing to a connection that previously had none.  

Yes, p. 384 of my copy of the Green Book explains:

    Once a connection has been opened, the evaluation manager keeps it
    open until it is explicitly closed, or the session ends, even if
    no corresponding S connection object exists.

What are some advantages of this design choice?  

> The OP has never told us what anonymous connections' are, but it is
> quite possible that his unstated ideas are incompatible with the
> documentation.

Yep.  The current behavior is as documented in the Green Book and yes,
the enhancement I would like is incompatible with that documentation.

What is an anonymous connection?  Well, really what I want is for the
evaluation manager to clean up connections that have no corresponding
S connection objects referring to them.  Then the code examples that
are part of this thread would work.


+ seth