[R] New project: littler for GNU R

[Seth Falcon]

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

> Seth Falcon wrote:
>> Wow, looks neat.
>>
>> OS X users will be unhappy with your naming choice as the default
>> filesystem there is not case-sensitive :-(
>>
>> IOW, r and R do the same thing.  I would expect it to otherwise work
>> on OS X so a change of some sort might be worthwhile.
>
> (I'm always amazed at how I can miss the simplest details. I probably
> knew at some point that OS X shipped with a case-sensitive file
> system, which you can turn off somehow, but forgot. Thank goodness for
> peer review.)
>
> 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).

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

'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.

+ seth