[6332] in s-news-athena
Re: Quitting S[explanation & editorial]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jmc@research.att.com)
Tue Jan 31 15:07:24 1995
From: jmc@research.att.com
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 95 14:28 EST
Original-From: jmc
To: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
1. Explanation. Why does
quit <- q()
mean that typing
quit
quits S? The reason for this and several other suggested approaches
working is that S quits if the top-level expression is an object of
mode "quit". (The idea being that the object might get passed back
from a function & the quit was supposed to take place at the end of
the whole expression.)
2. Editorial.
In a reasonable user interface, you would like not to have to learn
how to quit from the individual languages/tools, but have a standard
interface for ANY tool. Microsoft Windows tries to do this, for
example, by having an Exit on the File menu in each application and/or
a standard icon on the menu bar to quit.
This works fine for S-Plus, I think.
S-mode in emacs tries to do somewhat the same in Unix with C-c C-q.
No criticism of people who would also like to fix up some sneaky
"command", but perhaps the better solution is not inside S/S-Plus
but in the interface between the language and the operating system.
