[R] translation from the old-S

[John Chambers]

> Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 21:08:58 -0600 (CST)
> From: Roger Koenker <roger at ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu>
> Sender: owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Precedence: bulk
> 
> In ancient times, circa 1980, S data directories were called swork and sdata
> not .Data, and "New-S" as described in the already medieval "Blue Book"
> discusses a function DBCONVERT that converted swork data into .Data data.
> 
> It is embarrassing to admit it, but I still have data archives from a BTL
> machine called alice in the swork format and would like to convert a dataset
> to something modern.  I had assumed that DBCONVERT or some equivalent would
> still be in my early modern Splus 3.3 version, but apparently not.  
> 
> Could anyone advise me on an alternative strategy?
> 
> My apologies for such a backward looking question, but in my experience
> the most forward looking are those also capable of looking backward. 
> So this seemed to be the most promising venue for the question.
> 
> url:	http://www.econ.uiuc.edu		Roger Koenker	
> email	roger at ysidro.econ.uiuc.edu		Department of Economics
> vox: 	217-333-4558				University of Illinois
> fax:   	217-244-6678				Champaign, IL 61820
> 
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Ah, history--

I did a little digging (not to imply that I remember that far back!).

DBCONVERT is (or was) a shell script that basically ran the S function
gtds(file) on all the file names for the old-S datasets.

If you have access to a version of S-Plus that still has the gtds
function,  you can do the same thing, either a file at a time or by
creating a shell script, and then dump the resulting S objects.
For example, if $dir is the name of the directory holding the old-S
datasets:
	ls $dir |sed "s:.*:& <- gtds(\"$dir/&\"):"  > myScript.S
and then run myScript.S as an S source file.


If gtds has disappeared from your available collection of old, but
still runable, versions of S-Plus, then life will be more difficult.

(The underlying code for gtds was written in the pre-processed
ratfor/Fortran described in "Extending the S System", R. A. Becker and
John M. Chambers, 1985.)

John Chambers

-- 
John M. Chambers                  jmc at bell-labs.com
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies    office: (908)582-2681
700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2C-282  fax:    (908)582-3340
Murray Hill, NJ  07974            web: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~jmc
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