On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Martin Maechler wrote: > >>>>> "Chris" == Chris Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >>>>> on Wed, 25 Feb 2004 14:21:43 +0000 writes: > > Chris> Peter Dalgaard wrote: > >> Chris Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> > >>> editor. I think it would be a good selling point if the equivalent > >>> existed for R, without the need to use an external editor (or a hack > >>> in Tcl/Tk). > >>> > >>> > >> > >> Why is that a "hack"? I really must object. > >> > >> Tcl/Tk is a GUI framework with a text editing widget which can be > >> trivially used for this kind of purpose (the same is likely true for > >> other GUI frameworks like GTk). > > > Chris> Sorry, wrong choice of word - no disrespect meant to > Chris> the work you've done with R-Tcl/Tk. I think I meant > Chris> more "grafted-on". Rgui itself is not written in > Chris> Tcl/Tk - so to require installing a whole new GUI > Chris> framework for such a fundamental task as editing R > Chris> code seems a somewhat over-the-top solution. > > you would be right iff .... > > - AFAIK you can't easily have a newer version of R for windows > without tcltk -- hence it's there anyway
Not so: the mini installation has no Tcl/Tk support. > - the Bioconductor project (and others as well, notably John > Fox' R Cmdr) have extended on the basic tcltk functionality > for many GUI tasks. > > tcltk (or Gtk !) have the big advantage of working cross-platform. > This is a very important point since it eases maintainability, > documentation, teaching, .... and development considerably. But it does not work naturally for Windows users. It does make sense to me to use a Windows editor widget for script windows under Windows, which is where people seem to want them. There are also event-loop issues which mean I would have little confidence that a Tcl/Tk-based editor would work smoothly under Windows. > Chris> Rather the strength of Tcl/Tk seems more for building your > Chris> own customised GUIs. R for Gnome, on the other hand, > Chris> is written in gtk, but I've never used this so I > Chris> don't know about its editing capability. It has none, not even a version of the data editor. Let's not discourage Chris from doing this: it would satisfy a lot of Windows users, I believe. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
