[R] New project: littler for GNU R

[Jeffrey Horner]

Seth Falcon wrote:
> Jeffrey Horner <jeff.horner at vanderbilt.edu> writes:

[...]

>> littler will install into /usr/local/bin by default, so I don't think
>> there's a clash with the Mac binary provided by CRAN, right?
> 
> It depends what you mean by clash :-)
> 
> If both are on the PATH, then you get the first one, I suspect, when
> running either 'R' or 'r'.  I haven't tested this bit yet, but on my
> OS X laptop I can invoke a new R session using either 'R' or 'r'
> (using an R built from source, not the R GUI app thingie).

Good point, but the executable path can be named absolutely in hash-bang 
scripts. Relative paths work as well with the use of '/usr/bin/env 
program' as is described in the littler announcement, but then you don't
get to pass arguments to 'program', just to the hash-bang script.

> 
> So IMO, a different name or an integration into the R script in some
> way would be a big improvement.

But I'd like to know why there's an R script in the first place. Why not 
just an executable as on windows?

> 
> 'r' is cute, but going down the road of tools with the same name
> except for caps leads to confusion (for me).  For example, R CMD
> build/INSTALL still catches me up after a number of years.

That's a different problem than case-sensitivity. The word 'build' must 
have had a different semantic than INSTALL, and I'm not sure why one was 
all caps and the other isn't.

Jeff
-- 
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/JeffreyHorner