Re: [O] Write org variables into own R environment instead of .GlobalEnv

[Andreas Leha]

Hi Rainer,

Rainer M Krug <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi
>
> I just send a patch which changes the behaviour of how org variables are
> treated in R. At the moment, org variables are simply stored in the
> .GlobalEnv which means, that all show up in the variable listing (which
> can get cluttered when having many variables), they can accidentaly be
> deleted and not be restored from within R and saving all the variables
> into from R to make them available after tangling is not that easy.
>
> Therefore the patch writes the variables into their own environment
> (which I simply called org) and locks the environment and the
> bindings. This means, that the actual variable values are always in the
> environment and can not be accidentally deleted. As the environment is
> attached to the search path, they are accessible as before, but they do
> not clutter the workspace and do not show up separately e=when using
> ls() to list the contents of the workspace. When using ls(org) all can
> be seen.
>
> They can still be "overwritten", but but this only creates a new
> variable of the ame name in the .GlobalEnv which is simply hidint the
> original variable passed from org. The original variable can be accessed
> via org$VARIABLENAME. When removing the defined variable VARIABLENAME
> via rm(VARIABLENAME), the value passed from org is back.
>
> In addition, all variables can be easily be saved to disk by using
> save(org, file="/PATH/TO/FILE.Rdata") and reloaded with
> (load("/PATH/TO/FILE.Rdata")). This mechanism could actually be included
> into tangling as the default mechanism to load the variables to avoid
> cluttering the code with all the assignment commands of the org
> variables.
>
> The patch is not yet extensively tested.
> Please provide some feedback about the idea and implementation,

Currently I lack the time to test the patch.  So, this is just a
(not-so-helpful) feedback on the idea:  Seems to be very good!

Regards,
Andreas