Interactiveness
On Tue, 11 Dec 2007, Bjarni Juliusson wrote:
Hi list! I'm developing R integration for a project called Bioclipse at Uppsala University. The current implementation works by simply forking an R and sending it text (with some substitutions on it) down a pipe, getting the printed output back up another pipe. This of course works fine, except it runs into one problem: R finds a pipe on its stdin and decides to be "non-interactive", which means that as soon as the user makes a typo and causes an error, R exits.
Actually, not so. The default error handler for non-interactive use is to do that, but you can change it.
I checked the source, and it's a couple of isatty()'s in the two files named system.c that are doing it. They are of course intended to be a feature, but in this case it causes us trouble. Would it be possible to get a command line switch to control this behaviour? I'm not sure pseudo terminals can be used portably, or can they?
They can, and are e.g. by ESS (except on Windows, where there is already a switch). I think you need to look a bit more carefully at what other projects do.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk 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