On 16/03/2009 5:06 PM, Romain Francois wrote:
hadley wickham wrote:
It would be pretty easy to use the output from the R parser (which is never
wrong, is it?), and dump some markup out of it. For example the showTree
function in codetools dumps an R expression as Lisp, this is not too far
from generating html, or any other markup.
As this sounds like fun, I'll volunteer to do something about this. Another
advantage is that we can imagine to plug hyperlinks in R code that lives in
html help pages.
This also sounds like a good idea for a google summer of code project
- that way you might be able to get a student to give you a hand as
well.
Hadley
That did cross my mind earlier this evening, it just seems a bit too
easy to last all summer, but maybe I am missing something difficult. I
will start to play with this over the next few days, and make up my mind.
It depends on your standards. You said you want R to parse the code in
the Rd file. That's going to be hard, because Rd files contain
something that is only "R-like", as far as the parser is concerned.
You'll need to convert it into R code before you can pass it to the R
parser.
And then there's the question of scoping, which gets into the evaluator,
not just the parser. (The parser only recognizes "mean" as an
identifier; it's the evaluator that decides whether it's the function in
the base package or a local variable.)
So if you've got high standards, it's probably quite hard. On the other
hand, if you're willing to accept the usual sort of errors that syntax
highlighters make, it's not so bad, but not trivial.
One of the problem I might run into is performance, if we want this to
treat all Rd files, we are going to want something very efficient, and
it might not be enough to build on top of codetools (which uses
recursion at the R level) , but could make sense to provide a C level
implementation.
Remember what Knuth said about premature optimization. Write it first
in R, and only optimize it if it's not fast enough. (I'd guess it'll be
fast enough: Brian Ripley reported that all the R code he wrote for
conversions in R-devel was faster than the Perl code it was replacing.)
This could lead to interesting things as:
- syntax highlighting in sweave (or decumar)
- pretty printing in the console (using ansi characters)
- syntax highlighting in R help files, potentially with hyperlinks
I have requested creation of a project on r-forge. Anyone else want to
play with this ?
I'll sign up once it's going.
Duncan Murdoch
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