[R] more or less pager

[David A. van Leeuwen]

R-users,

(forgive my return adres)

I've been breaking my head why R---which i find fabulous, by the 
way---does not pipe interactive output through a pager (more or less), 
like it does with help(), or like GNU Octave does with arrays with more 
than terminal height rows. 

Maybe it is my installation (Debian/GNU Linux).  Maybe it is my 
configuration, but i don't think so because with help() it works

## Default pager
PAGER=${PAGER-'/usr/bin/less'}

But i think it really is because R-users apparently don't look at 
dataframes with more than, say, 24 rows.  I always seem to be intetrested
in column names with some rows of data, so often I type

 > data[1,]

just to see what the columns were called again.

In order to circumvent the problem of data running off the screen, I've 
made a simple hack:

more <- function(x) {
  tmp <- paste("/tmp/R", floor(runif(1,0,1e6)), sep=".")
  sink(tmp)
  print(x)
  sink()
  file.show(tmp, delete.file=TRUE)
}

which isn't the prettiest implementation of `tmpfile', but hey, it 
allows my to type

 > more(data)

Please ignore this if there is a more proper way of doing this in R 
(preferrably by default without the more()), but also please include 
some reference to this under keywords `pager', `more' or `less' in the 
documentation.

Developers, thanks for all the work.

-- 
David A. van Leeuwen			< @ElseWare.nl>

	  Echt stijlvol sterven doe je / bij een ander op de mat
	  Op de dag dat je bezorgd wordt / door het NRC Handelsblad
	
							---Joop Visser