[R-gui] R-SIG-GUI digest, Vol 1 #20 - A silly question, perhaps

[Mark Myatt]

All,

Please humour me on this but I have become confused about the subject of
our deliberations. I think we are discussing the creation of an
extendable GUI for R - a sort of GUI wrapper like RGUI.EXE on Win32
platforms but with a little more functionality. The GUI would allow the
development of WIMP interfaces to R functions rather like the S-Plus
interface does to S functions. The aim would be to make using R a
slicker and easier experience as well as providing an open source
alternative to packages such as SPSS but far better, of course, because
it could be tailored to particular fields. Reading the traffic on this
list, it seems that others are thinking of a development environment for
bespoke applications that require the crunching power of R. Crudely this
comes down to (1) A GUI for R or (2) The ability to build an all singing
all dancing GUI in R.

The two are not wholly contradictory goals but I suggest that (2) can
already be done with tools already available ... as Peter pints out this
is even possible from common scripting languages, if you don't like the
oddities of TCL then there is PERL, Python, Ruby, Java, &c. out there -
GTK, MOTIF, QT all have WYSIWYG UI editors. My contention is that (2)
can already be done but (1) has not been done.

This is a roundabout way of asking "What are we about?". As I started,
please humour me. Am I missing something?

Mark


--
Mark Myatt