[R-SIG-Mac] Running BUGS via R on a Mac

[Bill Northcott]

On 18/06/2007, at 8:00 PM, Byron Ellis wrote:
> In general, probably not or at least not without a lot of work. I've
> never really looked, but if the BUGS stuff is separate and the R
> library simply executes an external copy, it might be possible to use
> the Oberon->JVM compiler to get a running version of BUGS and then go
> from there. I've never tried it though.

I did have a look at this and it is not a runner.  There is little  
resemblance between current versions of Oberon and the Black Box  
framework used for Winbugs.  A better looking approach was using the  
Gardens Point Component Pascal compiler, but that was still going to  
involve rewriting a lot of Black Box functions.
>
> On 6/17/07, Matthew Keller <mckellercran at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'd like to be able to run winbugs or openbugs from within R on my  
>> mac without
>> having to be in the windows environment. Does anyone know if it is
>> possible to run OpenBugs via BRugs, or Winbugs via R2WinBugs, on a
>> Mac? If so, how does one accomplish it? Thanks in advance,

Although you can run Windows/Linux programs along with MacOS stuff on  
your Mac they could only communicate via a network socket or  
similar.  Again that would need a lot of work.

Have you looked at JAGS?  http://www-ice.iarc.fr/~martyn/software/jags/

It will run quite a lot of BUGS code as it is.  The latest  
sourceforge code will run even more and has better samplers.  Martyn  
Plummer is actively working on it.  It uses the R maths library and  
is designed to eventually be an R package.  There is plenty of  
support for it already available in R.  It will build simply enough  
on MacOS X if you have a current R distribution and the included  
compiler installed.  If you have problems, email me.

Bill Nothcott