Re: [R] Source awareness?
Well, Bill, at risk of embarrassing myself, in my case, I have gone this sort of route out of plain wrong thinking. I took way too many years to learn about R packages; it seemed that hurdle was too high (it wasn't really) and so I followed the kinds of tricks that I needed to do in other languages. Sourcing sets of scripts was one of those tricks. Today, in most cases, I have found that when I travel this thinking path, I need to re-think and set up a package to do the work. That said, I have on occasion dropped projects that I couldn't figure out a clean way to do within R. In those cases, it was simply easier to do in Perl, Python or even csh. Still, because R is so powerful, I find myself doing more and more of the basic parsing and processing within R and this leads to models of processing more similar to that using in those other languages. For example, making a filter (in the Unix sense) out of R turns out to be challenging to write in a concise manner ('littler' solves this, but I have had some stability issues with it); I've standardised my filters now based on a generic Makefile, generic csh-script which is processed by sed, plus the actual R-code. It isn't really pretty, but it is smooth now. It didn't fit the standard R model of data and code in one directory, however, so it became a bit uglier. The specific question below could be used to set up built in test functions, in a manner similar to what is done in Python. That is probably not the way to build in unit tests in R, but it is similar to the way I did it for years in other languages. Another place that had caused me trouble is when I have my data stored in one location (I work at a company where the laboratory deposits large data sets in a predefined set of locations and I don't have write access there) and my analysis scripts are in another location which is part of a CVS source tree. If someone else checks out my scripts from CVS, they need to run properly on data in the fixed location, regardless of where they started from, yet produce their results in script, not the data directory. We can all think of ways to make that work, however, one possible approach involves the script knowing where it is. I'm not saying that any of this is right, merely speculating on the cause of people thinking about source awareness as I have gone that route myself. And in some cases, as I said, it was wrong, and in other cases, less well defined (as I can't think of the specifics now), it was the only way I could find to make some code work (as I couldn't think of a solution, that code doesn't exist); this was usually code that was to be deployed for a user to run as a command line tool on a data set. One particular use I would like for the path to the R script is for reproducible research. I currently log many aspects of any particular processing run with sessionInfo() and other tools. However, the only way I have to record the actual script name is via CVS and a string within R, something like $Id$ or $RCSfile$. I usually end up processing that thru a 'gsub' to strip out the '$' so that the log file, which is stored in CVS as well doesn't get updated further. It is easy to have multiple versions of a script for processing some data; knowing the script name and directory path can help in logging what was done with some data. Regards, Mark William Dunlap wrote: Over the years I've seen lots of requests concerning how to conveniently call scripts from other scripts. The S (R S+) language is oriented towards functions, not scripts (or macros), and many of the requests are for things easy to do in functions (or packages of functions) but not in scripts. Some would be easier if one used a package of scripts (built with the usual R package building tools). I'd like to know from people who do this sort of thing what pushes them toward using sets of scripts instead of functions. I can think of several possible reasons but would like to hear from people who actually do this sort of thing. E.g., is the clarity and concreteness of a script the important thing? Is it difficult to make a package of functions? Is it that people are used to another language where scripts or macros are the preferred way to go? Or are other reasons? Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Ralf B Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 8:50 AM To: r-help Mailing List Subject: [R] Source awareness? Here the general (perhaps silly question) first: Is it possible for a script to find out if it was sourced by another script or run directly? Here a small example with two scripts: # script A print (This is script A) # script B source(C:/scriptA.R) print (This is script B) I would like to modify script A in a way so that it only outputs 'This is script A' if it was called directly, but keeps
[R] Source awareness?
Here the general (perhaps silly question) first: Is it possible for a script to find out if it was sourced by another script or run directly? Here a small example with two scripts: # script A print (This is script A) # script B source(C:/scriptA.R) print (This is script B) I would like to modify script A in a way so that it only outputs 'This is script A' if it was called directly, but keeps quiet in the other case. In addition to that, is it possible to access the stack of script calls from the environment? Ralf __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Source awareness?
?sys.call ## and friends. -- Bert On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Ralf B ralf.bie...@gmail.com wrote: Here the general (perhaps silly question) first: Is it possible for a script to find out if it was sourced by another script or run directly? Here a small example with two scripts: # script A print (This is script A) # script B source(C:/scriptA.R) print (This is script B) I would like to modify script A in a way so that it only outputs 'This is script A' if it was called directly, but keeps quiet in the other case. In addition to that, is it possible to access the stack of script calls from the environment? Ralf __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Source awareness?
Over the years I've seen lots of requests concerning how to conveniently call scripts from other scripts. The S (R S+) language is oriented towards functions, not scripts (or macros), and many of the requests are for things easy to do in functions (or packages of functions) but not in scripts. Some would be easier if one used a package of scripts (built with the usual R package building tools). I'd like to know from people who do this sort of thing what pushes them toward using sets of scripts instead of functions. I can think of several possible reasons but would like to hear from people who actually do this sort of thing. E.g., is the clarity and concreteness of a script the important thing? Is it difficult to make a package of functions? Is it that people are used to another language where scripts or macros are the preferred way to go? Or are other reasons? Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com -Original Message- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Ralf B Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 8:50 AM To: r-help Mailing List Subject: [R] Source awareness? Here the general (perhaps silly question) first: Is it possible for a script to find out if it was sourced by another script or run directly? Here a small example with two scripts: # script A print (This is script A) # script B source(C:/scriptA.R) print (This is script B) I would like to modify script A in a way so that it only outputs 'This is script A' if it was called directly, but keeps quiet in the other case. In addition to that, is it possible to access the stack of script calls from the environment? Ralf __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Source awareness?
See findSourceTraceback() in the R.utils package. /Henrik On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Ralf B ralf.bie...@gmail.com wrote: Here the general (perhaps silly question) first: Is it possible for a script to find out if it was sourced by another script or run directly? Here a small example with two scripts: # script A print (This is script A) # script B source(C:/scriptA.R) print (This is script B) I would like to modify script A in a way so that it only outputs 'This is script A' if it was called directly, but keeps quiet in the other case. In addition to that, is it possible to access the stack of script calls from the environment? Ralf __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.