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A friend is in search of a method to translate SPSS 'syntax' files to semantically equivalent R source code files.
I suppose, no one ever wrote a translator. But maybe I'm wrong.
PS: Please excuse the wrong use of 'syntax': People using SPSS tend to name an SPSS source program a 'syntax file' ;-)
The short answer is that sorry, you are right, there is no tool for automatically translating SPSS script to R script. Even worse, such a tool would likely take several (many?) man-years to create, so don't hold your breath.
A small concession is that it is probably not to hard to create a tool for translating very small, specific subsets of SPSS to R. For example, if you have a chunk of code for reading in CSV files, then you could use regular expressions to extract the useful bits from the SPSS code and autogenerate some R code from them. In most instances however it will be far easier and faster to manually port the code yourself.
If all else fails, ask Bob Muenchen; he know a lot about porting SPSS to R.
Another option for this is SPSStoR, which claims to be able to translate many common (but basic) SPSS procedures to R code. It seems to be under active development on GitHub as of August 2014.
I know it's been more than 3 years after the question was originally asked, but it's worth noting that a German company by the name of eoda is actually working on such software. It's called translateR. It is currently in beta status and you can register for a beta test on their website.
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I wrote a program, and I'd like to write a manpage for it.
I started to learn Groff, and I really find it awful. The man macros are difficult to understand, difficult to use, and a real obstacle to productivity. The mdoc macros add a nice "semantic" extension, but they still suffer of limitations which make it incredibly hard. The resulting "code" is poor in maintainability.
Of course I know I can convert any modern markup language (say Markdown) into manpages via pandoc, but I dislike the result, and I'm not that fond of adding pandoc as dependency of my project, anyway.
Is there a way to obtain a decent manpage from a reasonable markup language?
I write manpages for the bash and ruby scripts I write.
I format them in markdown, which is a popular and simple text format.
Then I use a ruby gem called ronn to process the markdown into groff format with man macros. Ronn can also output html from the same markdown source.
OP here. After checking some alternatives, I decided to go for Asciidoc.
There are many alternatives indeed. For example, check this other question.
I also realized that there's no good answer to this question, given the fact that many tools can be used, and in the end it is just a matter of taste :)
I'll just vote for closing my own question (if anything it will remain as reference).
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I have a very simple question really. There's a demo function demo() i.e. demo(scoping) which runs a demo of the topic. How do I write something like this for my own package? Its crazy but I have tried googling for any documentation related to it but there is none available (either that or my googling skills suck big time). I tried the documentation for devtools and roxygen too but maybe I missed it.
Can anyone point me in a right direction? Are there any packages which can generate it during the package installation? Or do I have to write it manually (I'm totally fine with that but right now I have zero information on this).
And yes, I would want to be able to do it in R console (not rstudio).
While roxygen2 does not allow you to create demos, it does allow you to include special #examples within the documentation[1]. These showup in your function or object help pages and can even be run automatically upon loading the package to test for functioning dependencies, or they can just serve as examples to your end users.
devtools on the other hand offers vignettes which is a "long-form guide to your package"[2]. These can be accessed through your overall package documentation and actually linked to anywhere within your documentation. You can make multiple vignettes and make them function or work-flow specific, organized by function family or something similar.
If you are adamant about using demos, you'll have to manually go through the trouble of establishing the proper directories, formatting and testing the demo files. If you do intend to go down this path, Hadley Wickham has some very sparse documentation on the subject here: [3].
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I am writing a program that needs a list of English words as a source file for it to work. I realise that these source files are available for students writing games such as Hangman or Crossword solvers but I am having trouble locating such a source file and wonder if anyone knows how I can attain one without slowly scraping websites and building up a dictionary manually.
What about /usr/share/dict/words on any Unix system? How many words are we talking about? Like OED-Unabridged?
For an English dictionary .txt file, you can use Custom Dictionary.
You can also generate a list aspell or wordlist with own settings.
Also you can take a look at http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
Only english words: http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~foster/dictionary.txt
Also take a look at:
http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/
http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~foster/dictionary.txt
350,000 words
Very late, but might be useful for others.
There's also WordNet. Its data files format are well-documented.
I used it for building an embeddable dictionary library for iOS developers (www.lexicontext.com) and also in one of my apps.
#Future-searchers: you can use aspell to do the dictionary checks, it has bindings in ruby and python. It would make your job much simpler.
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I'd like to know if there exists a spreadsheet application which uses an existing functional-programming language to define functions.
I've already heard about Resolver One which uses python, but I'm more interested in anything which uses a purely functional language like Haskell.
Thanks
Spreadsheets are quite a popular application among functional programmers. They have been a recurring theme in papers over the years. Some of the more memorable papers include
Spreadsheet Functional Programming by David Wakeling (2007).
Forms/3 by Margaret Burnett and many others (2001)
Implementing Function Spreadsheets by Peter Sestoft (2008)
You can also read about an effort to make Excel more functional.
For each of these papers I have either read the paper or heard a talk based on the papers. None of the papers is fabulous but all of them are good. I think the one with the most interesting ideas is by Sestoft—and his experimental results are pretty amazing.
If you count JavaScript as a functional programming language you can use Google Web Scripts for Google Spreadsheets :)
There's Scheme In A Grid (http://siag.nu/siag/), but it's looking kind of out of date.
There's also Haxcel (http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/projects/Haxcel/), which was a thesis project.
If you want to do functional programming in a spreadsheet the best practical choice is probably Resolver One, as you've already noted. (I would say "functional programming" in this context means first-class functions that work with other spreadsheet functions and the sheet itself - i.e. you could write a function that returns a function, call it and have the result go in a cell for yet other cells to call, etc. I don't know if OpenOffice and Google Docs will do that.)
A colleague and I have been working on a little project to do this within Excel, using a syntax very close to Excel formulas. I described it briefly in a comment on Roy MacLeans's VBA Blog:
http://roymacleanvba.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/domain-specific-languages-%e2%80%93-part-2/#comment-130
It's changed some since I posted that, but if you want to call our very-minimal syntax a "language", it's certainly "pure". (And I'm still planning to release it to the vast universe of FP-implemented-in-VBA enthusiasts, but stuff keeps coming up...)
There is herculus.io
But it seems down currently.
The guide describes a concept I find very interesting: https://app.herculus.io/doc/guides/app/
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I'm working with a small team of analysts and statisticians on what will be a medium-sized body of R code. They're smart people, but they're not trained or experienced as programmers, per se. (I am.) They've written some R code, but for our project to be expandable, efficient, and maintainable, it needs to become well-structured, and rather more piratical. One of the better way to learn to be a better programmer is to study elegant existing code. Can anyone suggest some open source examples of R code (on CRAN or wherever) that you think are particularly clear, literate, and good examples? Functional is good, S3 objects are OK, deep magic is bad.
My two favorite packages can both be browsed on R-Forge and are very well documented (although they may be too big for an introduction):
The caret homepage and source code.
The zelig homepage and and source code.
I think that the Google style guide does a great job of capturing the style of the Core team, although Hadley has his own style guide which can be read if you're looking at his packages. You can browse Hadley's packages on Github (and his homepage is full of useful content), in particular:
plyr
ggplot2
reshape
This article on the R-Wiki is also a good read for seeing ways to optimize code.
Not strictly related, but make sure you get them used to using Source Control (perforce, subversion, git, rcs, etc) as quickly as possible. That reduces the learning pains.