[R] creating and populating an environment

[Christian Prinoth]

Hi, I often work with R by writing long(ish) Excel-VBA macros
interspersed with calls to R via RExcel. A typical example of this would
be:

Sub VBAMacro()
	'fetch some data from an excel sheet
	'do some basic stuff on said data
	'transfer data from vba to R
	'run some R statements
	'get data back to vba
	'show results on the excel sheet
	'clean R by deleting all vars that were created: rrun
"rm(a,b,c,....)"
end sub

This has two obvious disadvantages, as I have to make sure:
1) not to use R variable names which may already exist
2) to remove all variables (garbage collection)

In order to overcome these issues I was wondering if I should execute
all R statements inside the R macro in a separate namespace. I have
looked at new.env() but am not really sure how it is supposed to be
used. If I type "temp<-new.env()", how do I make sure that all variables
declared from then on end up in the "temp" environment? Once I am done,
is "rm(temp)" sufficient to get rid of all its content?

Basically, I would like to replace the above example with:
Sub VBAMacro()
	rrun "A<-new.env()"
	'fetch some data from an excel sheet
	'do some basic stuff on said data
	'transfer data from vba to R
	'run some R statements
	'get data back to vba
	'show results on the excel sheet
	rrun "rm(A)"
end sub

Thanks
Christian Prinoth
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