[R] Scripting capabilities for R

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Wed, 30 May 2001, Marc Feldesman wrote:

> Quite apart from the learning/teaching/installing/maintaining end of this
> (I've got students using Linux, Unix, Windows, and 5 different flavors of
> Mac) I just have real difficulty asking students to solve a problem by
> spending more money - either to buy a shareware editor (on top of $150 in
> books for 1 class), or to buy a bigger hard drive to install a svelte 95 MB
> editor (Xemacs) that is at least 5x the size of R itself.   One of the
> beauties of R is that it is really compact and open-source.  It ceases to
> be compact if you have to add Emacs or Xemacs to the equation.  It ceases
> to be open-source if you have to buy something to make it work more
> efficiently.

I use "gvim" as my editor on Windows and Linux systems. The syntax coloring has
saved me many hours of time, especially in Perl scripting, where missing quotes
stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. I haven't looked to see how big it is
relative to Emacs. Check out http://www.vim.org for more details. "vim" has
macro capabilities; I'm sure someone (perhaps one of your students) could build
a "Vim Speaks Statistics" capability with little or no trouble. I believe R
syntax coloring already exists; I know the option is there but if there's
another language called "R" it might be for that language rather than our "R".
--
znmeb at aracnet.com (M. Edward Borasky) http://www.aracnet.com/~znmeb

Q. How do you tell when a pineapple is ready to eat?
A. It picks up its knife and fork.

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