-*- mode: text; mode: view-minor -*- Annoucing the release of ESS-5.1.2 (Emacs Speaks Statistics). ------------------------------------------------------------- (New: improvements to SAS support, Splus 5 support, Splus 4.5 under Microsoft Windows support) ESS is an Emacs package which provides a standard interface between statistical programs and statistical processes. It is intended to provide assistance for interactive statistical programming and data analysis, and was is based on and extends the capabilities of S-mode. The code is freely available but is not in the public domain. It is distributed under the GNU GPL. Please read the file COPYING for more information about the license. ESS grew out of the desire to extend S-mode-4.8. The current set of developers desired support for: - XEmacs - R - S4 - Microsoft Windows In addition, with new modes being developed for R, Stata, and SAS, it was felt a unifying interface and framework for the user interface, would benefit both the user and the developer, by helping both groups conform to standard Emacs usage. The end result is an increase in efficiency for statistical programming and data analysis, over the usual tools. We are grateful to David M. Smith , the previous developer (for S-mode 3.x and 4.x), as well as to the initial developers of S-mode, Doug Bates, Ed Kademan and Frank Ritter. And to help remove any further confusion: The name is __ESS__. Not ESS-mode. Thank you :-). 0.5. NEW FEATURES IN THIS RELEASE! ---------------------------------- Beginning with ESS 5.1.2 we are able to use inferior iESS mode to communicate directly with a running S-Plus 4.x process using the Microsoft DDE protocol. We use the familiar (from Unix ESS) C-c C-n and related key sequences to send lines from the S-mode file to the inferior S process. We continue to edit S input files in ESS[S] mode and transcripts of previous S sessions in ESS Transcript mode. All three modes know the S language, syntax, and indentation patterns and provide the syntactic highlighting that eases the programming tasks. For Microsoft platforms, the version of Emacs that this has been tested with is NTEmacs 20.2.1 (and 20.3?). More information about NTEmacs can be retrieved from: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs.html including information on retrieval and installation. This has not yet been tested with XEmacs for Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT. 1. FEATURES ----------- Languages Supported (or planned for support) - S dialects: S 3/4, S-PLUS 3.x/4.x/5.x, and R - LispStat dialects: XLispStat (planned: ViSta) - SAS - (planned: Stata) - (planned: SPSS dialects (SPSS, PSPP)) Editing source code (S, LispStat, SAS) - Syntactic indentation and highlighting of source code - Evaluations of subsets of code in different processes (one at a time) - Loading and error-checking of code - Source code revision maintenance - limited interaction with Noweb, for literate statistical programming. Interacting with the process (S, LispStat, SAS) - Command-line editing - Searchable Command history - Command-line completion of S object names and file names - Quick access to object lists and search lists - Transcript recording - Interface to the help system Transcript manipulation (S3, S+3, S+4, S4, S+5, R, XLispStat) - Recording and saving transcript files - Manipulating and editing saved transcripts - Re-evaluating commands from transcript files 2. STABILITY ------------ Version 5.1.2 is meant as a new feature release, with some bug fixes from ESS 5.0. We consider it BETA-software. In particular, 3. REQUIREMENTS --------------- ESS version 5.2 requires Emacs version 19.29, XEmacs version 19.14, or later version. ESS is supposed to work with any version of S, S-PLUS, R, SAS, or XLispStat. It has been most thoroughly tested with: S-PLUS versions 3.3, 3.4, 4.5, 5.0; R versions >=0.49; XLispStat versions >=3.50; S4; and SAS; on the following systems: SunOS (all) Solaris (all) SGI (all) Linux (S-PLUS 5.0, R, XLispStat, S4) Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT (SPLUS 4.5) Emacs 19.29, 19.34, XEmacs 19.16, XEmacs 20.4, XEmacs 21.0 Emacs 19.28 with SAS (with additional modifications) NTEmacs 20.2.1 with S-PLUS 4.5. It may need some work with other configurations. We have included configuration suggestions for emacs 19.28 and SAS in Doc/README-19.28. Work for porting to Microsoft-developed operating systems is continuing, especially with Splus 4.x and NT Emacs. Other possible connections include XLispStat (under the Splus DDE interface), R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata. In addition, XEmacs support (for native NT and Cygwin versions) needs to be evaluated. 4. GETTING THE LATEST VERSION ----------------------------- The latest versions of ESS are always available by WWW from: http://franz.stat.wisc.edu/pub/ESS/ ftp://franz.stat.wisc.edu/pub/ESS/ You can download the current version of the README there, as well. The HTML version of the documentation can be found at: http://stat.ethz.ch/ESS/ The most recent developers release of ESS can be obtained via anonymous CVS by... (NEED TO ADD INFORMATION!) 5. THE ESS MAILING LIST -------------------------- There is a mailing list for discussions and announcements relating to ESS. Join the list by sending an e-mail with "subscribe ess-help" (or "help") in the body to ess-help-request@stat.math.ethz.ch; contributions to the list may be mailed to ess-help@stat.math.ethz.ch. Rest assured, this is a fairly low-volume mailing list. The purposes of the mailing list include - helping users of ESS to get along with it. - discussing aspects of using ESS for GNU Emacs and XEmacs. - suggestions for improvements. - announcements of new [beta] releases of ESS. - posting small patches to ESS. ---- Richard M. Heiberger Kurt Hornik Martin Maechler A.J. (Tony) Rossini