Hello.

One of my clients asked if it would be possible to have an IDE which could
use type discovery for R functions to make flow-like construction of an R
program. Something like a LabView graphical composition of processing
elements.

They called this type of program composition a "workflow".

I looked at some of this programs, like:
* Orange http://orange.biolab.si/
* RedR http://www.red-r.org/
* Rattle http://rattle.togaware.com/
* Rpad https://code.google.com/p/rpad/

and all of them did type introspection (they made mapping between R
functions and their IDE's visual framework) by hand for each function of
supported packages which is time and resource consuming.

So, to reduce an amount of code to be written for adapters between R and
IDE some kind of annotations could be introduced over parameters and return
values. Those could be optional and will help to discover type information
for support of dynamic composition of programs.

Do you have any suggestions on the topic?

Best regards,

Artem Oboturov

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