Re: Are there any currently major roadblocks on creating/maintaining an interface to R, such as ROctave?

[Carlos Paradis]

Hi Nicklas, 

Thank you for the follow-up. 

Encountered Matlab at University first time about 19 years ago, Octave is similar and think the basics have stayed the same. Get the impression development have slowed down and remember name of mathematicians lived hundred years ago, Leibniech, Newton, Jerome Cardan, Karl Pearsson, et. al. mostly dead.

I am not sure if I understand your point concerning the mathematicians. To be clear, I am trying to understand how hard would be to resurrect a project like ROctave and what background would be required. For example, do the difficulties still persist mentioned in DSC 2003? Were there any proposed solutions? I found very little discussion while searching on the subject, and was surprised considering the purpose of R and Octave overlap. 

Concerning the oct-files, my current understanding is that to follow that approach I would need to create an oct file for every function of interest on every R package I use on my Octave project. This does not seem doable, and an external language interface like ROctave to simply call functions directly from R would seem simpler to maintain at first glance. 

Regards,

cp

On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 12:58 AM Nicklas Karlsson <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I currently have a large package in Octave that has some sizeable
> functionality which depends on R packages. As it is, my octave package
> interfaces the R packages via Octave's *unix *function call (in essence,
> the R package dumps a single final analysis .csv, which is then loaded in
> Octave).
>
> However, this is not very flexible: Much functionality of the R package is
> left out via functions, for example, which could be used in Octave.
>
> 1) Trying to find a better way to go about it, I stumbled upon DSC 2003, *10
> Years of Octave - Recent Developments and Plans for the Future. *Section
> 2.2.4 discusses some limitations 17 years ago, but I wonder if they still
> persist (or worsened):
> https://www.r-project.org/conferences/DSC-2003/Proceedings/EatonRawlings.pdf

Encountered Matlab at University first time about 19 years ago, Octave is similar and think the basics have stayed the same. Get the impression development have slowed down and remember name of mathematicians lived hundred years ago, Leibniech, Newton, Jerome Cardan, Karl Pearsson, et. al. mostly dead.

> ROctave: http://www.omegahat.net/ROctave/ (last updated 18 years ago).
>
> 2) I'd also be interested in knowing if there are any other alternatives to
> just using *unix*. Oct-files appeared a possibility using Cpp to import R,
> and then Octave to Import Cpp, but if I understand it right, it would
> require individually coding each R package function now and in the long
> run.

As I understand R is written in C/C++ and by adding a wrapper it could be compiled to an .oct file which could be called from Octave just as any other function. This is probably a rather good solution.


Nicklas SB Karlsson