[R-sig-finance] [R] Bloomberg Data Import to R

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 08:42:19AM -0600, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

> Barely platform independent. Bloomberg supports only Windows and Solaris, and
> I'd be surprised if there even were a dozen installations using Solaris ...

Last I heard, more than a year ago, Bloomberg was actively trying to
get users off Solaris, setting deadlines for when it would be
desupported, etc.  Bloomberg on Solaris may be gone completely by now,
I'm not sure.

> So matter-of-factishly, it's Windoze-only. Just like the COM solution.

Yep.  Of course, if Bloomberg were suddenly to decide to support their
Terminal on Linux or some other non-Windows operating system,
presumably they would continue to include the C API there as well.

Also, Bloomberg seems to regard their C API as legacy software.  I
assume they won't be adding much new to it, but that also means that
they're unlikely to change it enough to seriously break it's latent
cross-platform-ness, however much of that it really has.  :)

Presumably the Bloomberg Terminal codebase has been becoming more and
more MS Windows centric, though.  My vague understanding was that the
C API doesn't really need the Terminal to function, but it piggy backs
on the Terminal's authentication somehow.  They could stick in some
other sort of authentication if they really wanted to.

I could imagine them spinning off the C API codebase, enhancing it,
and then offering it as some other sort of product.  But then again,
although it's fast, the C API isn't terribly user friendly - even for
C programmers - so maybe their potential customers wouldn't be
interested anyway.

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/