[R] Four quick questions

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Amy C. Peng wrote:

> I have four quick questions about R:

I think you mean R on Windows.

> 1)  Can R make a 3-dimensional rotating scatterplot?

Yes, via calls to XGobi: you need the xgobi package from CRAN and the
bits its mentions (most notably my port of XGobi itself to Windows).
Once you have done that you get a _lot_ more gra[hics capabilities.

> 2)  Does R have OLE capabilities?

Um. OLE went out of use as a term a long time ago. There is a DCOM
(Active X Automation) interface: see the contributed area on CRAN.

> 3)  Is it possible to create a pop-up window in R to display a message and
> allow for user input?  (I know I can use readline() from the command line,
> but I just wondered if it was possible to use pop-up windows.)

Yes, but you will need to write C code and compile it in.  That sort of
thing is coming, slowly.

> 4)  Once an RGui is opened, can I "send" a source file to the opened RGui
> from outside the RGui (i.e., from a DOS command or something)?

No, but you can do this sort of thing via DCOM (see 2). One day (but not
yet) you may be able to use DDE.
 
> I looked through the R documentation, and my guess is that the answer to
> all four questions is "No", but I wanted to ask the "experts" to make sure
> that I wasn't missing something!  Thanks for your help!

>From an overall view, your questions look as if you are looking for a
clone of S-PLUS 2000. It is not our intention to provide that, and if you
want those facilities you perhaps ought to be using S-PLUS 2000.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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