Rodney Sparapani writes:
> I appreciate being brought into this discussion. I'm going to be
> tied up for a few months, but, in my view, FFI is the future of
> XEmacs (is SXEmacs still around? haven't heard much from them
> lately).
I believe so. They have their own lists and stuff, so they only show
up here when they have something important to say.
I thought they might speak up
and jump on this brilliant suggestion :o)
For R, I would think it's feasible, but I'm really not sure
what net
benefit that would have. On the one hand, it's true that comint
interfaces are pretty finicky. But on the other, they're a lot more
flexible than FFI would be for "on the fly" variations. Dunno about
OpenBUGS, I don't even know what it is (although I probably can
guess).
Excellent question. comint actually works pretty well as far as it goes.
But, somebody has combined R and OpenBUGS (a Bayesian statistical
package that
has an indescribable interface) into BRUGS, but only on Windows. I'd
like to
extend that to additional platforms and I see FFI as one possible solution.
We are teaching our students that using Windows is necessary :o( This is
a total reversal from when I went to school and UNIX was a necessity.
For TeXmacs, I suspect it would be quite fiddly. I guess you have
in
mind something like passing a buffer to TeXmacs for display?
Maybe I went too far
with that. I was just trying to give an
example of what might be possible with FFI.
> I suppose we are talking about Linux only,
No, we're talking about GCC on platforms which support GCC-style FFI
(I forget whether this is libffi or not). This includes at least
Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. ISTR you had problems with it on Solaris,
or were aware of problems on Solaris. But it's not limited to Linux,
for sure.
In theory there should be similar facilities on other platforms like
Solaris and BeOS, but somebody would have to port.
Right, I should have said GCC.
But, I also forgot to mention that the
OpenBUGS libraries are only available on Linux. I guess we could
add Mac OS X via ELF loading
http://osxbook.com/software/xbinary But,
then I would want a Cocoa port and be able to designate the Meta key too
:o)
--
Rodney Sparapani Center for Patient Care and Outcomes Research
Sr. Biostatistician
http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
4 wheels good, 2 wheels better! Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
WWLD?: What Would Lombardi Do? Milwaukee, WI, USA
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