Re: cross tables in reports?

[Gontran Zepeda]

% Stanley A. Klein (address@hidden) wrote:
> [ A+ comes after C when alphabet is mapped to difficulty space ]
>
> [ R has lots of uses and users ... ]

It so happens I have spent part of the past couple weeks hacking up a kludgey
perl *cough* package that interacts with R by providing simple routines to
reliably manipulate input and output to R which is executed via system calls.
So after seeing Stanley's post about how to specifically go about pivoting
data in R I thought I'd pipe up.

First, R is difficult to work with in that it's syntax is, I guess, very
similar to S and quite un-gnu like (hard to figure out how to do simple
things from within R).  However, R is excellent for statistics.

Second, R doesn't have a python API that I'm aware of.  There is however an
API for using python from _within R_ at http://www.omegahat.org, which is
something I guess, but rather seems the wrong direction.  Most extension of R
seems to be unsurprisingly R-centric.

What R _does_ have (thanks again apparently to the guys at omegahat) is a DBI
type interface.  That's right kids, get data from mysql, postgresql or plain
flat files into your analysis space directly from R.  I've used this with
success from within my R wrapper package.

An improved version of this wrapper in implemented in python could be done,
but I believe that providing number analysis facilities through R should be
optional at best (yet another dependency).  On the other hand, there's the
power of R.

Doesn't jamest have pivot tables working anyway?  Are there other wacky
statistics thingees that need to be done that R could do conveniently?



Gontran
-- 
3 Celsius feels a bit warmish.