How to organize large R programs?

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The standard answer is to use packages — see the Writing R Extensions manual as well as different tutorials on the web.

It gives you

  • a quasi-automatic way to organize your code by topic
  • strongly encourages you to write a help file, making you think about the interface
  • a lot of sanity checks via R CMD check
  • a chance to add regression tests
  • as well as a means for namespaces.

Just running source() over code works for really short snippets. Everything else should be in a package — even if you do not plan to publish it as you can write internal packages for internal repositories.

As for the ‘how to edit’ part, the R Internals manual has excellent R coding standards in Section 6. Otherwise, I tend to use defaults in Emacs’ ESS mode.

Update 2008-Aug-13: David Smith just blogged about the Google R Style Guide.

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