R Documentation(s)
On Wed, 3 May 2000 Setzer.Woodrow at epamail.epa.gov wrote:
If I may throw in my two cents. I sometimes consult with scientists who use GUI-based statistical packages for doing "simple" analyses of their data. The packages I've seen don't do a good job of producing a usable audit trail. If someone comes to me and says "What does this mean?" or "What do I do now?", I pretty much have to go and watch their actual keystrokes while they repeat (hopefully) the operations. One real advantages to the dialects of S is that the script that does the analysis serves (or can serve, if well-commented) as an audit trail that can be rerun (with changes, if needed). One take-home lesson here is, if there is to be a GUI that produces R function calls, it would be really helpful if it were easy to insert comments that document the actions, and that the function calls be captured in a file that can be 'sourced' to re-run the analysis.
The Axum-based GUI in S-PLUS 2000 does keep a history: you can even dump it to a script to give command-line equivalent commands. (That is commands that run Axum, not say traditional graphics near-equivalents.) That seems the best of both worlds. The R for Windows GUI does have a limited programmability. Everything you do there generates S language commands that go into the commands history (whether you like it or not). In both R and S-PLUS the history files are plain text and can be edited at will later.
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 272860 (secr) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._