[R-gui] [Rd] R GUI considerations

[Duncan Murdoch]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> I notice that there is some discussion on this at
> http://developer.r-project.org/ under the links involving the
> word threading.  Thus using the facilities of another language
> seems to be one approach and building such facilities into
> R itself another.
> 
> On 10/15/05, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> 
>>Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>>>The preferred solutions in the post all seem to involve another language:
>>>
>>>- tcl to use tk
>>>- Python to use wxWidgets
>>>
>>>and other solutions mentioned also seem to involve other languages:
>>>
>>>- Visual Basic
>>>- Java (Swing?)
>>>
>>>Is there some key missing feature in R with regards to GUIs
>>>that requires interposing another language?

I think the Java/C++ style of object oriented programming is 
particularly well suited to writing GUIs.  GUIs contain a lot of objects 
that need to maintain their state, and that need to respond to messages. 
  The different kinds of objects have a lot in common with one another, 
and also some specific differences.

You don't need an OOP language to write a GUI (the Windows Rgui is 
written in C, for example), but it makes things easier.

You can write R in that style, but it's not the standard style to use, 
so it's not particularly easy.

Duncan Murdoch