[R] Writing Excel (.xls) files on non-Windows OSs using Perl

[Hans-Peter]

Hi,

2007/7/8, Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz at comcast.net>:
> [snip]
> There exists the xlsReadWrite package on CRAN by Hans-Peter Suter, which
> is restricted to Windows, since it utilizes the non-FOSS MS Office API
> to write the Excel formats.

The non-FOSS API is not the problem(#) but its implementation is:

The 3rd party library I use is written in Pascal and supports Delphi
and Kylix. Kylix would allow to port the package to Linux but as Kylix
has unfortunately been abandoned by CodeGear (Borland) I am not
ready/interested to spend my time on this dead road. Though it
probably could be done quickly.

A much more interesting way is to port the package using FreePascal.
--> I plan to do this since long but...
--> Maybe someone fluent on Linux and FreePascal could have a look at
the pascal header files (treetron.googlepages.com) and make the demos
run on Linux..., that would be great and speed up an eventual
xlsReadWrite port!

-- 
Regards,
Hans-Peter

(#) at least for people who are not in principle opposed to run a
package which contains a non-FOSS code part.