[Rd] 2009 Wish list for R

[Gabor Grothendieck]

2009 Wish list for R (no particular order):

- some way of placing backslashes in literal strings without escaping them.
  Useful for latex, regular expressions and Windows file paths.  This seems
  to come up from time to time on the lists.  Ruby, python, Perl and other
  scripting languages have various ways to handle this which might be used
  as a model.

- in Windows, some way to tell Packages | Install menu to use
  dependencies = TRUE (vs. dependencies = NA now).
  NB. utils:::menuInstallPkgs is the R routine invoked

- self-contained R executables

- default origin in Date.  as.numeric.Date and as.Date.numeric are
  asymmetric in this respect.

- here documents in sourced input

- read.table(textConnection(Lines)) later gives annoying warning message
  about closing connection.  If too hard to fix add an asText= arg,
  e.g. read.table(Lines, asText=TRUE)

- View() buttons to copy to clipboard. (print and save might also be nice.)

- allow library() command to determine what is imported like python's
	  import ... from ...

- Lag < function(x, k, ...) lag(x, -k, ...)
  lag is regarded by many as confusing and this would give a second
  option while keeping lag for compatability.

- generic filter()

- add executable for filefind.cc in docs.miktex.org to R bin directory
  on Windows to give an easy way to locate MiKTeX.  Alternately
  put it in Rtools.

- real subclassing of environments

- ability to conditionally emit portions of a Sweave
document even if they represent both text and code
portions without using crude workarounds.  For
example if all the data for a certain figure is missing
that figure and the associated paragraphs describing
it and the R code shown associated with it could
all be suppressed dynamically.

- pfg TeX driver