GitHub - yihui/rlp: An Example of Using Literate Programming for R Package Development (original) (raw)

rlp

This is an example package of using Literate Programming for developing R packages. Most R package authors probably write R code in the R scripts under the R/ directory, and use comments to explain code. This package shows that you do not have to develop a package in this way. You may write R code in R Markdown documents, and extract the code to the R/ directory automatically viaknitr::purl(). At the same time, you will get a nicely formatted output document displaying the source code chunks as well as the text/prose chunks, and this output document can be a package vignette. Please see the package homepage for more details: https://yihui.org/rlp/. This package is licensed under MIT, and you are welcome to file issues or submit pull requests.

Acknowledgements

This approach is not possible (at least not easy) without a few important components in the toolchain:

• The support for non-Sweave vignettes since R 3.0.0, which has opened far more possibilities than I originally imagined;
• The RStudio IDE, which allows us to build an R package by clicking a button;
• The rmarkdown package, which generates beautiful HTML/PDF output;
• GNU make, which makes it easy to define how and when to compile a file;

Let me also thank whomever invented holidays, which is often my most productive time. Oh I cannot live without holidays.