From: AlexG <alexg@...>
Date: 2006-03-29T18:08:42+09:00
Subject: Calling R from Ruby

Hi,

I'm interested in making (well using, but I might be prepared to make)
a bridge between Ruby and R. The RSPerl and RSPython packages seem to
do pretty much what I want to do (in Perl and Python).

My first question is does such a thing already exist? I could only find
ruby-rmathlib (a wrapper for some of the math functions included in R)
on the RAA and nothing on rubyforge. For obvious reasons searching for
'R' related topics is always difficult so I may well have missed
something.

I've a basic proof of concept (adapted from the RSPerl source code)
(provisionally called rruby) where by:

require "rruby"
RRuby.new.eval_R("print","me")

Does what you would expect (fires up an embedded R interpeter and
prints "me"), and it seemed simple enough that I thought someone else
might have already done this and had some more advanced code that I
could borrow/look at/contribute to. If not, I will look at converting a
little more of RSPerl tomorrow to see if I can get something actually
useful working.  

Alex Gutteridge