[R] Conversion of S+ libraries

[William Dunlap]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of 
> Bill.Venables at csiro.au
> Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 5:33 PM
> To: Glenn.Treacy at ilim.com; r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] Conversion of S+ libraries
> 
> It would certainly not be straightforward, unless Tibco has 
> done a lot of work to make it possible in recent years, 
> (which is not unlikely).  They have done a lot of work in the 
> other direction, i.e. enabling R packages to be used within S-PLUS.

In my experience porting S+ code to R is not very difficult,
as long as your code doesn't rely on manipulating the S+ Windows
GUI, using the S+ importData and exportData functions, using
Connect/C++  or Connect/Java, using the bigdata package, or 
using graphlets (applets for interactive graphics in web pages).

Most of the items Bill V. noted are problems when porting from
R to S+ but not the other way around.

I recommend first making your code into a package (the
structure of which is very similar in S+ and R).  You
can convert an S+ *.sgml help file to an R *.Rd help file
with 'Splus CMD Sd2Rd file.sgml > file.Rd'.  Install
the package using both S+ and R and run your tests in both.

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com 

> 
> S-PLUS has the concept of a "chapter", which roughly 
> corresponds to a working directory in R, but also the 
> package.  The chapter is already strongly file structured, 
> and quite different to the way R has of doing things.  There 
> is also the notorious scoping rule problem which makes 
> translation of advanced code quite tricky, if not actually 
> impossible.  S-PLUS does not (or at least did not) have the 
> equivalent R environments, for example.  It has a concept of 
> "frames", which is a very different thing and much less flexible.
> 
> When moving from S-PLUS libraries to R packages, my approach 
> would be to go back to the code, get it working in R and then 
> build the R package.  The middle part, getting it going in R, 
> may take some time.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Treacy, Glenn
> Sent: Thursday, 21 October 2010 7:27 PM
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: [R] Conversion of S+ libraries
> 
> Does anyone have any advice on converting S+ libraries to R packages?
>  
> Glenn
> 
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