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.