[vox-tech] writing to a shell instance

[Norm Matloff]

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone!

I should mention the application:  A debugging tool for R (written in
Python).  R's internal debugging facilities are primitive, limited and
clunky, a lack that my program is intended to remedy.  For example, R's
own debugger doesn't have conditional breakpoints, but my program adds
them.  

My program writes commands to the R session, as if the user had typed
the commands him/herself.  As I said, I add a lot more commands, by
handling them within my program.

The current version is at

   http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/debugR.html 

It's basically for Unix-family machines only, because it relies on
"screen." I've gotten requests to port it to Windows, hence my query to
vox-tech.

I think the simplest solution may be to use Python to open a pipe to R,
and then have Python accept input from either the keyboard or the
debugger, say using select().

Norm