[Rd] R Startup configuration file

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 12/02/2010 10:33 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Simon Urbanek
> <simon.urbanek at r-project.org> wrote:
>
> > This is getting OT, but, please, no XML. It's entirely useless in this
> > context IMHO (as it is in others, but that's another story) and we already
> > have reliable support for storing R objects (more than one in fact). Despite
> > the fact that some used to claim human readability of XML in practice it
> > turns out to be false, so I don't see any real benefits of XML in this
> > context.
>
>  Yes, I agree. Originally I was hoping to have a nice
> human-and-computer readable config.ini file:
>
> [options]
> contrasts = structure(list(contrasts = structure(c("contr.treatment",
> "contr.poly"
> ), .Names = c("unordered", "ordered"))), .Names = "contrasts")
>
> but the lack of an ini parser in R made me think "heck, let's do it in
> something we do have a parser for...".
>
> maybe I should use JSON? Yeah, we have a parser and that's what all
> the hipster web 3.0 kids are using these days....
We have read.dcf() if you want human and machine readable.

Duncan Murdoch