yihui/activities — Issue #17: ideas on Sweave
Author: yihui
Created: 2011-10-11 19:15:08+00:00
State: open

It is simply horrible, if not impossible, to extend the standard Sweave function in base R, because it is poorly modularized in design and hard-coded in many places. Existing packages:

- `brew` is fairly light-weighted, and I like its simple style as well as its PHP-like nature (use `<% %>` instead of `<<>>= @` and the awkward `\Sexpr{}`)
- `pgfSweave` features beauty, which is extremely important to me; `tikzDevice` is an awesome package
- `cacheSweave` features cache, of course, and it is important to large-scale computation
- `decumar` is great in design; we no longer need to "ruin" the LaTeX document by weird illegal home-made nonsense pseudo-LaTeX code, since it puts literate programming code in LaTeX comments

What is my ideal Sweave package?

- we should be able to specify the pattern of R code to execute by ourselves; why? because literate programming with R should not be restricted to a particular type of output like LaTeX, HTML, or any other files; I want to borrow the design of `decumar` to put Sweave-related stuff in comments, but each language has its own definition of comments (may begin with `%` or `