[R] A Few Suggestions to help out newbies

[Thomas Lumley]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Lukas Kubin wrote:

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> On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Jonathan Baron wrote:
>
> > >8) Command completion and contextual help in R.  The first one is
> > >probably fairly easy.  The second one is probably impossible.  It would
> > >involve giving out detailed help messages when things go wrong.  Not
> > >sure how to do that.
> >
> > Doesn't ESS do this?
>
> Isn't this too automatical answer? I don't use Emacs and believe I'm not
> the only. But it is not the core problem. Why to connect as important
> basic (in my opinion) interface feature as command completion (at least)
> is with using a special text editor? In Octave, database interfaces and
> others command completion is a standard. So what's the reason not to
> include it in R?

This could presumably be done with the readline interface, though that
currently does filename completion, which I think is more useful.  There
would be no reason not to include it in R if the code existed (and was
portable and didn't mess up other things).

However, ESS almost certainly is the *reason* that there isn't command
completion in R. Since most R developers and many users run R under ESS
there is little motivation for duplicating features of ESS in R. It's
much easier to learn Emacs/ESS than to write command completion code.

	-thomas

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