ANNOUNCING ESS
**************
Annoucing the release of ESS-5.1.3 (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 :-).
License
=======
ESS is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later
version.
ESS is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
in the file COPYING in the same directory as this file for more details.
New Features
============
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 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.
Current Features
================
* Languages Supported:
* S dialects (S 3/4, S-PLUS 3.x/4.x/5.x, and R)
* LispStat dialects (XLispStat, ViSta under development)
* SAS
* Stata
* SPSS dialects (SPSS, Fiasco (GNU project)) (under development)
* SCA (under development)
* Editing source code (S, LispStat, SAS)
* Syntactic indentation and highlighting of source code
* Partial evaluations of code
* Loading and error-checking of code
* Source code revision maintenance
* 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, S4, R, XLispStat)
* Recording and saving transcript files
* Manipulating and editing saved transcripts
* Re-evaluating commands from transcript files
* Help File Editing (R)
* Syntactic indentation and highlighting of source code.
* Sending Examples to running ESS process.
* Previewing
Stability
=========
Versions 5.1.x are meant as a beta-level releases. While some bugs
are fixed from 5.0, others have been introduced, especially with
regards to new features. See the file Doc/TODO for details. Bug
reports are solicited; see the BUGS section below. Patches or
suggested coding fixes with bug reports are much appreciated!
Requirements
============
ESS version 5.1.3 requires Emacs version 19.29 or later, or version
XEmacs 19.14 or later. 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
* SAS
* Stata >=6.0
on the following platforms
* SunOS (all)
* Solaris (all)
* SGI (all)
* Linux (S-PLUS 5.0, R, XLispStat, S4, Stata 6.0)
* Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT (SPLUS 4.5)
with the following Emacsen:
* Emacs 19.29, 19.34, XEmacs 19.16, XEmacs 20.4, XEmacs 21.0
* Emacs 19.28 with SAS (with additional modifications)
* NTEmacs 20.3.1 with S-PLUS 4.5.
It may need some work with other configurations. We include
configuration suggestions for emacs 19.28 in Doc/README-19.28. These
are the changes we made in order to use ESS with SAS on a Digital Alpha
running Emacs 19.28.
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/'
The HTML version of the documentation can be found at:
`http://stat.ethz.ch/ESS/'
The latest (no more than 24 hours behind the developers) version of
ESS can also be retrieved using anonymous CVS. Details on this are
forthcoming.
Reporting Bugs
==============
Please send bug reports, suggestions etc. to
<ESS-bugs@stat.math.ethz.ch>
The easiest way to do this is within Emacs by typing
`M-x ess-submit-bug-report'
This also gives the maintainers valuable information about your
installation which may help us to identify or even fix the bug.
Note that comments, suggestions, words of praise and large cash
donations are also more than welcome.
Mailing Lists
=============
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.
Authors
=======
* A.J. Rossini (http://www.biostat.washington.edu/~rossini/)
<rossini@stat.sc.edu>
* Richard M. Heiberger (http://www.sbm.temple.edu/departments/statistics/) <rmh@fisher.stat.temple.edu>
* Kurt Hornik (http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik)
<hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at>
* Martin Maechler (http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/)
<maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>