[R-SIG-Mac] Scripting R

[Simon Urbanek]

On Jan 30, 2009, at 10:45 , Christian Prinoth wrote:

> Simon,
>
>> As I said in my earlier e-mail AFAICS neither Microsoft nor Apple
>> support plugins and for OO there is already a plugin.
>
> Thanks, I will checkout the OO plugin, this might be the best  
> immediate
> solution
>
>> capabilities. (E.g. it will be likely a pain to use anything
>> bu simple
>> numbers/vectors). But at least it would be something to play with.
>
> FWIW, RExcel allows passing only scalars, arrays and dataframes  
> between
> R and Excel. It would be pointless to try to accomodate any "exotic" R
> datatypes on a spreadsheet.
>

Hmm .. I thought it can do plots and such ... (and BTW a dataframe is  
already a quite complex structure ;)).


>> However, this is an entirely different question. I'm not sure AS is
>> the best tool for this purpose -- but then the options are
>> rather few
>> due to lack of plugins ...
>
> Just for curiosity, why do you think AS would not do? I am  
> relatively new to the OSX platform, but I thought that the  
> "pervasiveness" of Applescript would eliminate the need for any sort  
> of plugin architecture since every application can "export" features  
> via an appropriate dictionnary that may then be accessed system-wide.
>

For AS to work you need two "native" UI applications. Ideally, to  
embed R in Excel you don't want all that - you just want Excel to be  
able to access R's functions by embedding R (at least that's what I  
would do ;P). Note that I have no clue about Excel on a Mac, so I  
don't even know whether you can use formulae in Excel that will map to  
AS requests which is the minimal requirement for this to make any  
sense ... Anyway, I may look into adding some push/pull AS facilities  
to the R GUI and we'll see whether it will be useful for anything or  
not ...

Cheers,
S