a knitr question

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 9:47 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com <mailto:murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>> wrote:

    On 30/07/2014, 2:20 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:

    > As a reader, I often want to run the code by myself _while_ I'm
    > reading a particular part of an article/report. I find it convenient
    > to be able to copy the code as I'm reading it, instead of minimizing
    > my current window, opening an R script, and running the part that I'm
    > interested in. Of course, this may not work if the code I copy is not
    > self-contained; your purl() approach certainly has an advantage
    > sometimes.
    >
    > I do not see a whole lot of value in maintaining the same appearance
    > of the R code in the R console and a report. You can teach your
    > students what the prompt characters mean, and I think that is enough.
    > Journal of Statistical Software requires "R> " as the prompt character
    > (which is worse), and your students will probably be confused when
    > reading JSS papers if they have been seeing the default prompts all
    > the time. I see the point of keeping prompts (i.e. I do not completely
    > disagree), but I do not think it is an essential or important thing to
    > do. Personally I prefer reading "vanilla" code, and >/+ may confuse my
    > eyes occasionally, e.g.
    >

    >> z > 5
    >> x +

    > + y
    >
    > (More on prompts:
    > http://yihui.name/en/2013/01/code-pollution-with-command-prompts/)
    >
    > Re Rich: yes, I'm aware of approaches of post-processing the prompts,
    > but this problem would not have existed in the first place if we do
    > not include prompts at all. I'm not sure if it makes much sense to
    > create some mess and clean it afterwards.
    >

    So your suggestion is that the R console should not prompt for input?
    Do you know of *any* interactive system which doesn't prompt for input?
     How would users be able to tell the difference between R waiting for
    input, and R busy on the last calculation?


I don't think that this is about prompts in interactive R, but when a
document is knit, should the echoed code in the report have prompts or not.

 

    Duncan Murdoch

    > Regards,
    > Yihui
    > --
    > Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com <mailto:xieyihui at gmail.com>>
    > Web: http://yihui.name
    >
    >
    > On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Greg Snow <538280 at gmail.com

    <mailto:538280 at gmail.com>> wrote:

    >> My preference when teaching is to have the code and results look the
    >> same as it appears in the R console window, so with the prompts and
    >> without the output commented.  But then I also `purl` my knitr

    file to

    >> create a script file to give to the students that they can copy and
    >> paste from easily.
    >>

    >
    > ______________________________________________
    > R-help at r-project.org <mailto:R-help at r-project.org> mailing list
    > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
    > PLEASE do read the posting guide