[R] New project: littler for GNU R

[Richard M. Heiberger]

I like this plan and have now played with the concept.  I did the following
on Windows in cygwin.  It would also work in Unix, and I think could be tickled
to work on the standard MS cmd line in Windows.  It would certainly work
on Windows with a Windows-native port of the basic unix utilities.

echo 'options(echo=FALSE);cat(pi^2,"\n")' | Rterm --no-save 

This produces an output file, that normally shows up in the *shell*
buffer, but could be redirected.   The obvious place to redirect it to is
awk with a script to filter out everything above the echo of the options()
line. 

The only change to R needed to remove the need for an awk script
is to suppress the display of the copyright message and startup
information.  I suppose that could be done with a new
 --suppress-startup-info argument to Rterm.

The other optimizations that Jeffrey and Dirk have, such as
suppressing the loading of many of the standard packages,
would also need to be done.

Very good work and concept.

Rich