Scripting R
On Jan 30, 2009, at 10:45 , Christian Prinoth wrote:
Simon,
As I said in my earlier e-mail AFAICS neither Microsoft nor Apple support plugins and for OO there is already a plugin.
Thanks, I will checkout the OO plugin, this might be the best immediate solution
capabilities. (E.g. it will be likely a pain to use anything bu simple numbers/vectors). But at least it would be something to play with.
FWIW, RExcel allows passing only scalars, arrays and dataframes between R and Excel. It would be pointless to try to accomodate any "exotic" R datatypes on a spreadsheet.
Hmm .. I thought it can do plots and such ... (and BTW a dataframe is already a quite complex structure ;)).
However, this is an entirely different question. I'm not sure AS is the best tool for this purpose -- but then the options are rather few due to lack of plugins ...
Just for curiosity, why do you think AS would not do? I am relatively new to the OSX platform, but I thought that the "pervasiveness" of Applescript would eliminate the need for any sort of plugin architecture since every application can "export" features via an appropriate dictionnary that may then be accessed system-wide.
For AS to work you need two "native" UI applications. Ideally, to embed R in Excel you don't want all that - you just want Excel to be able to access R's functions by embedding R (at least that's what I would do ;P). Note that I have no clue about Excel on a Mac, so I don't even know whether you can use formulae in Excel that will map to AS requests which is the minimal requirement for this to make any sense ... Anyway, I may look into adding some push/pull AS facilities to the R GUI and we'll see whether it will be useful for anything or not ... Cheers, S