While I can't really comment on how "reasonable" the approach is, I can 
certainly comment on the usefulness of it. I just put this together on my 
system; while learning to use Julia, it will be helpful to use this to 
blend the two languages until such time as I can make sole use of Julia for 
some tasks.

Chris


On Tuesday, February 4, 2014 11:03:37 AM UTC-8, Douglas Bates wrote:
>
> Yihui Xie, the author of the knitr package for R, was kind enough to write 
> another R package https://github.com/yihui/runr that allows an author to 
> specify
>
> engine='julia'
>
> as a knitr chunk option.  
>
> knitr allows for literate programming by processing a file in LaTeX or 
> Markdown with embedded chunks of code that are evaluated.  Usually the 
> evaluation is of R code chunks but this option allows for Julia code to be 
> evaluated.
>
> knitr uses R to process the file, extracting code chunks according to 
> given patterns and causing them to be evaluated.  For the julia engine a 
> julia process is initialized and set to receive messages over a socket, 
> evaluate the text passed to it and return the result over a socket.  See
>
> https://github.com/yihui/runr/blob/master/inst/lang/julia_socket.jl
>
> I don't know a lot about ZMQ but I do know that there are bindings for ZMQ 
> in both Julia and in R.  It seems to me that this would be a cleaner 
> mechanism for passing strings to a julia process, evaluating them, and 
> returning the result.
>
> Does this seem to be a reasonable approach?  Are there other mechanisms I 
> should consider instead?
>
>
>

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