R devel - Sep 2003 - tkinsert (PR#4289)

In R-1.7.1, I used to be able to append a character vector to a
'tklistbox' with e.g.

listio <- tklistbox( tktoplevel(), font='Courier', height=20,
width=20, setgrid=TRUE)
tkinsert( listio, 'end', letters[1:3])
tkpack( listio,side='left', expand=TRUE, fill='both')

and three items would be added to 'listio'. This doesn't work in
R-devel-- it looks as if only a single paste-collapsed item is added. This might
even be intentional, but seems undesirable!

The old behaviour can be obtained by reproducing the R 1.7.1 instructions:

.Tcl( .Tcl.args( listio, 'insert', 'end', letters[1:3]))

Mark

*******************************

Mark Bravington
CSIRO (CMIS)
PO Box 1538
Castray Esplanade
Hobart
TAS 7001

phone (61) 3 6232 5118
fax (61) 3 6232 5012
Mark.Bravington@csiro.au 

#       r-bugs@r-project.org


--please do not edit the information below--

Version:
 platform = i386-pc-mingw32
 arch = i386
 os = mingw32
 system = i386, mingw32
 status = alpha
 major = 1
 minor = 8.0
 year = 2003
 month = 09
 day = 22
 language = R

Windows 2000 Professional (build 2195) Service Pack 3.0

Search Path:
 .GlobalEnv, package:methods, package:ctest, package:mva, package:modreg,
package:nls, package:ts, package:handy, package:debug, mvb.session.info,
package:mvbutils, package:tcltk, Autoloads, package:base

Mark.Bravington@csiro.au writes:
> In R-1.7.1, I used to be able to append a character vector to a
'tklistbox' with e.g.
> 
> listio <- tklistbox( tktoplevel(), font='Courier', height=20,
width=20, setgrid=TRUE)
> tkinsert( listio, 'end', letters[1:3])
> tkpack( listio,side='left', expand=TRUE, fill='both')
> 
> and three items would be added to 'listio'. This doesn't work
in
> R-devel-- it looks as if only a single paste-collapsed item is
> added. This might even be intentional, but seems undesirable!
> 
> The old behaviour can be obtained by reproducing the R 1.7.1 instructions:
> 
> .Tcl( .Tcl.args( listio, 'insert', 'end', letters[1:3]))
So someone found out... 

This is just about the only incompatible change with the new Tcl_Objv
interface. The old way was one of those things that looked like a good
idea when written (to support exactly that situation), but never
really was. It made it difficult to pass character vectors as single
entities where that was desired. I.e., the new behaviour is a feature,
not a bug.

This leaves a generic problem with R programming: Given letters[1:3],
how to generate

tkinsert(listio, "insert", 'end', letters[1], letters[2],
letters[3])

Probably the neatest way is

do.call("tkinsert", c(list(listio, "insert",
"end"), as.list(letters[1:3])))

or maybe

i.end <- function(...) tkinsert(listio, 'insert', 'end', ...)
do.call("i.end", as.list(letters[1:3]))


An alternative is to use the listvariable techniques and maintain
things on the R side:

x <- tclVar()
listio <- tklistbox(tktoplevel() , listvariable=x)
tkpack(listio)
tclObj(x) <- mylist <- c("foo","bar","baz")
mylist <- c(mylist,letters[1:3])
tclObj(x) <- mylist

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
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