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in reply to Re^3: Perl for science
in thread Perl for science

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