Re^3: Perl for science

There are Perl modules to assist in working with R: such as R::Writer.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

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Re^4: Perl for science by tfrayner (Curate) on Feb 11, 2009 at 19:50 UTC
Indeed there are, after a fashion. I'm not sure if any of them are really all that useful, though. R::Writer is marked a alpha code, so with all due respect there's no way I'd use that (yet) for our lab's data analysis. FWIW, I'm also not sure if I'd personally have much use for the R::Writer approach; if one can already write flexible R code, why get perl to do it for you? The RSPerl module did work a couple of years ago (although not perfectly, even back then) and changes to R in the meantime have apparently broken the module (which appears to be unmaintained). I've toyed with trying to work on the RSPerl module myself, but my lack of knowledge of perl internals has so far put me off. Maybe some day... Instead, my approach in the past has generally been to either maintain R code in separate scripts (and R libraries for the larger stuff), and to pass data via temporary files and system() calls to Rscript. Certainly it's ugly, but at least it's relatively reliable and easily hidden behind a convenient perl wrapper. Tim	[reply]

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Re^4: Perl for science
by tfrayner (Curate) on Feb 11, 2009 at 19:50 UTC

The RSPerl module did work a couple of years ago (although not perfectly, even back then) and changes to R in the meantime have apparently broken the module (which appears to be unmaintained). I've toyed with trying to work on the RSPerl module myself, but my lack of knowledge of perl internals has so far put me off. Maybe some day...

Instead, my approach in the past has generally been to either maintain R code in separate scripts (and R libraries for the larger stuff), and to pass data via temporary files and system() calls to Rscript. Certainly it's ugly, but at least it's relatively reliable and easily hidden behind a convenient perl wrapper.

Tim

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