On 03/21/2013 10:00 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:
I would think that the ability to hit the Tab key to trigger name
>> completion in your R GUI makes partial matching almost useless. The
>> avantage of interactive completion in the GUI is that you immediately
>> see the result of the partial matching. So you get the best of both
>> worlds: no need to type long variable names in full, but no traps when a
>> match is not what you would expect.
>>
>> Doesn't this suit your use case?
> Good point. This works well at the command line. However, not when
interacting between emacs and R in the way I do. For reproducability I use and
emacs file that is being corrected and massaged with chunks submitted to R; at the
end I have a clean record of how the result was obtained.
>
If this is really true (that ESS doesn't complete in R files) then this seems
more like a bug (or wish?) report for ESS - other editors correctly support
code completion in R documents - after all this is a feature of R, so they
don't need to re-invent the wheel.
Cheers,
Simon
If you are running the R process inside ESS then there is matching -- it is R. Doing
this, keeping a log file, and then post-hoc cleaning up all the cruft from that file is
one way to keep documentation. But since for my analyses the number of models/plots/etc
that turn out to be detours or dead ends on the way to a solution is larger than the
worthwhile part (typos alone are lots larger) I prefer to keep the file(s) as their own
buffers and submit bits of them to an R process either by cut-paste to a separate window
or ess-submit to an inferior process. Emacs can't do name completion in that case. Nor
could it do so in an Sweave file, unless you were to keep a live R process in hand to
pre-test chunks as you wrote them. (One could reasonably argue that when one gets the
Sweave stage the names should be expanded.)
To summarize: my own interactive mix of emacs/R may be unusual. For pure interactive
folks completion does most of the work. I hadn't tried the newest ESS
interactive-within-emacs till today, it's slick as well. The number of people howling
will be less than my original thought, though not zero.
Still, this change could cause a lot of grief for saved R scripts. In our group the
code + data directory is archived whenever a medical paper is submitted (close to
500/year), and it is very common to pull one back as is 1-4 years later for further
exploration. A very small subset of those are in a legal context where exact
reproducability is paramount.
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