[Rd] On RObjectTables

[luke-tierney at uiowa.edu]

In my original reply I wrote

>> The
>> facility in its current form does complicate the internal code and
>> limit some experiments we might otherwise do, so I would not be
>> surprised if it was at least substantially changed in the next year or
>> two.

This is obviously _not_ the time to invest effort in documenting or
expanding this facility. If you want to use it, go ahead. But you will
have to figure things out from what you have and be prepared for
changes under your feet.

If active bindings can do what you want that may be a safer route to
consider.

luke

On Tue, 24 Jul 2012, Jeroen Ooms wrote:

> Maybe it is worth considering to document this functionality a bit
> more, or expose some wrappers in R? It's a bit obscure right now,
> which seems both dangerous in terms of maintenance and a missed
> opportunity (especially if people are already building on it).
>
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 2:06 AM, Michael Lawrence
> <lawrence.michael at gene.com> wrote:
>>
>> Luke,
>>
>> Please keep me advised on this, because the Qt interfaces heavily rely on the ObjectTables (btw, it has worked great for my use cases).
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 7:32 AM, <luke-tierney at uiowa.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> I believe everyone who has worked on the relevant files has tried to
>>> maintain this functionality, but as it seems to get used and tested
>>> very little I can't be sure it is functional at this point. The
>>> facility in its current form does complicate the internal code and
>>> limit some experiments we might otherwise do, so I would not be
>>> surprised if it was at least substantially changed in the next year or
>>> two.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> luke
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Jeroen Ooms wrote:
>>>
>>>> I was wondering if anyone knows more about the state of RObjectTables. This
>>>> largely undocumented functionality was introduced by Duncan around 2002
>>>> somewhere and enables you create an environment where the contents are
>>>> dynamically queried by R through a hook function. It is mentioned in R
>>>> Internals and ?attach. This functionality is quite powerful and allows you
>>>> to e.g. offload a big database of R objects to disk, yet use them as if
>>>> they were in your workspace. The recent RProtoBuf package also uses some of
>>>> this functionality to dynamically lookup proto definitions.
>>>>
>>>> I would like to do something similar, but I am not sure if support for this
>>>> functionality will be or has been discontinued. The RObjectTables package
>>>> is no longer available on OmegaHat and nothing has not been mentioned on
>>>> the mailing lists for about 5 years. I found an old version of the package
>>>> no github which seems to work, but as far as I understand, the package
>>>> still needs the hooks from within R to work. So if this functionality is
>>>> actually unsupported and might be removed at some point, I should probably
>>>> not invest in it.
>>>>
>>>>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>>>
>>>> ______________________________________________
>>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Luke Tierney
>>> Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
>>> Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
>>> University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
>>> Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
>>>    Actuarial Science
>>> 241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney at uiowa.edu
>>> Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu
>>>
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>>
>

-- 
Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney at uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu