Yes, lots of packages do use C/Fortran code ... it would be great if there were more packages that are "pure R" especially since the advent of S4 classes and namespaces. Is it worth suggesting that we create a designation "pure R" for packages that have no external source code and encourage more of these? Indeed, now the number of packages is so big could they be classified to aid potential users? Going back to the original question, it strikes me that C/Fortran code is most often used to interface to other code - there would be a better way of doing this in a Java environment - or to speed up existing R code - where loops are usually the cause of the speed problem and the introduction Java bytecode would presumably be helpful anyway. Surely there could be some sort of process to generate automated jni bindings? I don't think a Java implementation of the R parser is as bigger task as it seems ... much of the work to get an interpreted scripting language working could be taken from the Jython project? Regards, John
-----Original Message----- From: Simon Urbanek [mailto:Simon.Urbanek@math.uni-augsburg.de] Sent: 26 February 2004 15:39 To: Marsland, John Cc: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: Re: [Rd] Script editor for Windows GUI On Feb 26, 2004, at 11:58 AM, Marsland, John wrote:
On a slightly different tack, I have recently taken a look at Jython -
an
implementation of Python in Java that produces byte code that runs on
the
JVM. Combined with this there is a project called xoltar which aims to
bring
functional programming to Python. This got me thinking that a R parser
could
be written in Java for a core set of functionality allowing code and packages written in "pure-R" to be compiled as byte code and run on the JVM. Then one could call the SJava package from Java to execute anything unusual in R proper.... any thoughts?
Good question - due to the amount of packages that use C/Fortran code I had the impression that this sounds just too crazy. But I'm really keen on getting some feedback on this, because technically, one of the CS students here would enjoy doing something like that ...
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