Running S-PLUS 4.0 (for Windows) with NTEmacs and ESS 5.0
=========================================================

Here is what I have (partially) running. I'm assuming you know enough
emacs to know how to use this! In other words FOR EXPERT HACKERS only.


(A) The `S+4' support uses DDE to contact an already running S-PLUS4.
It uses Sddeclient.exe which should be on the path, or have its full
path specified in essd-s+4.el. I have modified this to avoid getting
two line feeds at the end of each line and to spoof prompts.  Note
that no output comes back. (That would be possible by rewriting
Sddeclient. I have such a client, but S-PLUS appears to have bugs in
its DDE implementation which I have reported.)  This seems to work
fine for submitting code from the S+4 buffer, and for submitting
_lines_ elsewhere.  The prompts do a reasonable job, but there can be
no `secondary' prompt.

Just to make sure, start this with M-x S+4.


(B) The `S+3' support runs the command-line client sqpe.exe: you will need
to set the path explicitly in ess-site.el and also set
SHOME; I have

(setenv "SHOME" "C:/packages/splus4")

in my _emacs. You need to have a file ~/.ess-S+3 containing

options(echo=T)

(and whatever else you want).

You will get an initial loop time-out reported. Just wait!

This suffers from the fact that sqpe does not produce prompts when I/O
are redirected _unless_ options(echo=T). So if you can put up with the
echoing, this works well.

Just to make sure, start this with M-x S or M-x S+3.


Note: these do work on Windows 9x.

Installation
------------

Well expert hackers don't need to be told, do they?

Copy essd-s+3.el, essd-s+4.el to wherever you have ESS elisp code.
Uncomment (require 'essd-s+4) in ess-site.el.
Byte-compile if you wish.

Copy Sddeclient.exe to somewhere in your path.

Distribution
------------

This is experimental code. Do not re-distribute except as an
unchanged zip file at a mirror of

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/SWin/ESShack.zip


Brian Ripley
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
29 May 1998

