2011-11-03-compstat-making-r-packages.html

--- 
type: post
status: publish
published: true
title: "CompStat: making R packages"
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tags: 
- Computational Statistics (CompStat) working group
- R
- Statistics
layout: post
---
In my <a title="working groups" href="http://www.stat.iastate.edu/researchdiscussiongroups/index.html" target="_blank">Computational Statistics working group</a> yesterday, <a title="Yihui Xie homepage" href="http://yihui.name/" target="_blank">Yihui Xie</a> (a graduate student in the department) gave a <a title="Yihui talk" href="http://yihui.github.com/slides/r-dev-lessons.html" target="_blank">talk</a> about his experiences creating R packages. Yihui maintain 7 R packages: <a title="R::animation" href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/animation/index.html" target="_blank">animation</a>, <a title="R::formatR" href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=formatR" target="_blank">formatR</a>, <a title="R::Rd2roxygen" href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=Rd2roxygen" target="_blank">Rd2roxygen</a>, <a title="R::R2SWF" href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=R2SWF" target="_blank">R2SWF</a>, <a title="R::MSG" href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=MSG" target="_blank">MSG</a>, <a title="R::iBUGS" href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=iBUGS" target="_blank">iBUGS</a>, and <a title="R::fun" href="http://cran.r-project.org/package=fun" target="_blank">fun</a>. With two more in the works: <a title="R::cranvas" href="https://github.com/ggobi/cranvas/" target="_blank">cranvas</a> and <a title="R::knitr" href="https://github.com/yihui/knitr" target="_blank">knitr</a>. From the talk, the ones that I was particularly interested in are
<ul>
	<li>formatR which allows you to write sloppy R code and have formatR fix it up as well as convert = signs to -&gt; (or vice versa),</li>
	<li>Rd2roxygen which is a counterpart to <a title="R::roxygen" href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/roxygen/index.html" target="_blank">roxygen</a> and aims at easing the process of documenting R packages by allowing the developer to write one document that contains both the code as well as the help documentation. roxygen separates these into their .R and .Rd files while Rd2roxygen does the opposite, i.e. when you want to update something in your code</li>
	<li>iBUGS which is aimed at easing the massive number of arguments required when using <a title="R::R2WinBUGS" href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/R2WinBUGS/index.html" target="_blank">R2WinBUGS</a>. I did give this one a shot and it appears to mainly be a GUI for setting these arguments which doesn't interest me as much.</li>
	<li>knitr which is meant to be an alternative to <a title="Sweave" href="http://www.stat.uni-muenchen.de/~leisch/Sweave/" target="_blank">Sweave</a> for creating living documents.</li>
</ul>
Give 'em a shot.