R devel - Dec 2000 - gretl and R: info and request

Hello,

I thought some of you might like to know about a GNU project
that is complementary to R in some ways, namely gretl

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/gretl

(GNU Regression, Econometrics and Time-series Library).
gretl (a library with cli and gui clients, the gui using
GTK) is designed to be very user-friendly, and suitable
for teaching econometrics.  It has a fairly wide variety
of least-squares based estimators plus binary logit and
probit, and a few "nifty" features such as reading
databases over the internet and producing LaTeX output.

I've been thinking how to extend gretl to offer further
statistical methods such as Maximum Likelihood estimation,
without re-inventing the wheel, and some sort of link to
R seems the best option.  In the latest gretl I've made
a rudimentary link: an option in gretl to fork off an
instance of R (using the gnome gui if available) and 
pop the current gretl dataset into R.

At present I get the gretl data into R by writing out
a suitable .Rprofile in the cwd before the fork (in case
there's an .Rprofile there already it gets backed up,
and restored on exit from gretl).  This is a bit of a
kludge, and here's my request: It would make life
easier if you could specify a config file on the R
command line.  That way I could leave any existing
config file undisturbed.

I'm also interested in any suggestions people might have
for linkage between gretl and R.  As a longer-term
project I may study up on omegahat and look into
(a) formulating a request for R within gretl, (b)
having R execute the request, in the background and (c) 
presenting the results back in gretl.

If anyone's interested, an email reply would be appreciated
since I can't really afford to join another list right now. 

-- 
Allin Cottrell
Department of Economics
Wake Forest University, NC
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Hi,
There are a couple of ways you could go.

One would be to build your application as an R library so that it could be
called from R and access your programs functions through and API an
example of this approach is ggobi, at www.ggobi.org. 

you can embed R in your application, a neat way might be to incorporate a
python shell into your application and compile R as a python module, i
believe you can find more documentation on thi approach on the omeghat web
page.

A third way (though i find this also cludgy) is to use interapplication
communication protocols such as corba or com.

I am sure there are more ways.

happy holidays
Nicholas

                 CH3
                  |
                  N             Nicholas Lewin-Koh
                 / \            Dept of Statistics
           N----C   C==O        Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
          ||   ||   |           Iowa State University
          ||   ||   |           Ames, IA 50011
          CH    C   N--CH3      http://www.public.iastate.edu/~nlewin
            \  / \ /            nlewin@iastate.edu
             N    C
             |   ||             Currently
            CH3   O             Graphics Lab
                                School of Computing
                                National University of Singapore
     The Real Part of Coffee    kohnicho@comp.nus.edu.sg


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