From: Alex Gutteridge <alexg@...>
Date: 2006-10-17T11:03:18+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] RSRuby 0.4

On 16 Oct 2006, at 22:39, hadley wickham wrote:

>>    require 'rsruby'
>>    r=RSRuby.instance            #Create R interpreter
>>    ttest = r.t_test([1,2,3])            #Convert [1,2,3] to R. Run  
>> t.test
>
> Also, calling t_test instead of t.test is a bit worrying, suggesting
> that you are automatically converting _ to .  - not a good idea!
>
> Hadley

Hmmm. Yes 't_test' is automatically converted to 't.test'. Again,  
this is the system used by RPy, which I have been slavishly copying -  
perhaps it is non-optimal.

The current release doesn't have an option to turn off the automatic  
function name conversion but it would be very easy to add. Many (the  
majority?) of the R functions I've seen use '.' as a word separator,  
but I agree it is naive to think that all functions will do this. The  
automatic conversion will stay in though because it is much prettier  
(in my opinion) to write:

r.t_test([1,2,3])

than the alternative:

r['t.test'].call([1,2,3])

If you can think of another scheme for calling these kind of methods  
then I'd be happy to hear it.

Dr Alex Gutteridge
Post-Doctoral Researcher

Bioinformatics Center
Institute for Chemical Research
Kyoto University
Gokasho, Uji, Kyoto 611-0011
Japan