[TxMt] problem with R interaction [was math bundle feature request]

[Hans-Joerg Bibiko]

Quoting Charilaos Skiadas <skiadas at hanover.edu>:

> This was my first approach to this too. The problem is that this is
> relatively slow, because it has to load R each time, and that does take
> up time. The interpreter sounds like a better idea, but it doesn't work
> out of the box. (well, I guess we don't even know if we can make it
> work at all yet ;) ).
> There is an approach that is relatively doable but had technical
> problems. We can start an R process in the background, and communicate
> to it via named pipes, which you can think of if you like as files on
> the hard drive that TM would write to and R would read from. This would
> be reasonably fast. The problem we are encountering, so to speak, is
> that this would mean a shared R environment for all your R work. So
> imagine you are working on three different R projects, on different R
> windows. They might be defining conflicting varialbes and messing up
> each other's computations, if they are sent to the same R process. So
> this adds a considerable amount of details that need to be overcome.
>

Well, I tried it to communicate with R via named pipes. It works quite  
good but one thing is tricky.

I created a fifo r_pipe

Then I started R via

R --slave <r_pipe >result.txt

After that I wrote in an other bash shell:

echo "2+3" >r_pipe

OK. In result.txt you can see [1] 5. But my R job was cancelled. I  
didn't find out a way to avoid this canceling.

Then I checked the following hack.
I call 'R --slave <r_pipe >result.txt' in a loop. Before R is  
cancelled I saved the workspace and reload that workspace with the new  
start. This works but if you have a large workspace it takes time.

The point is: how to avoid cancelling R??

My approach would be to start a new R session which is bounced to a  
named pipe. By doing so you could write in TM the line

3+4 >r_pipe17

for the 17th session I started.

Any ideas?

@hadley: Of course 'R --slave ...' simplifes the script.



-Hans

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