R-beta: Two simple suggestions.

[Luke Tierney]

Mike Meyer wrote:
> 
> 1) The .RData file (and S .Data area) are cputype dependent.  When R is used 
> from different types of machines (say, HP and Sun) that share a common 
> filesystem (say afs or dfs) then loading the wrong type of .RData file can 
> lead to mysterious behaviour.   In my environment, undergraduate students are 
> the most likely to log into different cputypes, and they end up being quite 
> confused.   To solve this problem in S I set up an S_WORK environment variable 
> that set the name of the .Data area, via the front end shell script.  For 
> example, on the HP I use .Data.hp.   I would like to see the same facility in 
> R.  if R_WORK is missing, then use the standard name.  If R_WORK exists, then 
> use that name as the file to save the R session in.  (Maybe S_WORK exists in 
> Splus only to please me, but it is useful :-).
> 

An alternative that may be worth considering is to make .Rdata machine
independent, perhaps by using the xdr routines -- I think these are
available on Mac and Windows as well as any unix system that does nfs.

luke
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