OCaml bindings for the R interpreter

OCaml-R is an Objective Caml binding embedding R’s interpreter into OCaml code. It also provides bindings to R’s standalone mathematical library, and has embryonic support for R’s standard libraries.

It can be used to build R datastructures in memory, call R functions and convert the returned value to OCaml datastructures.

The API documentation is available online.

Installation

opam install ocaml-r

Library usage

Under utop:

# #require "ocaml-r.base";;
# open OCamlR_base;;
# Numeric.(of_list [3. ; 1. ; 4. ; 1. ; 5. ; 9.] |> print);;
[1] 3 1 4 1 5 9
- : unit = ()

To access functions from package foo, load ocaml-r.foo, e.g.:

# #require "ocaml-r.stats";;
# OCamlR_stats.rnorm 6 |> Numeric.print;;
[1]  0.17350351 -0.72756521  2.02369760 -0.77302094 -1.28523133  0.05172992
- : unit = ()

There are other packages. ocaml-r.math links to the standalone mathematical shared library of R. Other packages, such as R.base and R.stats are embryonic bindings of R’s standard library. Help is very welcome on this side.

Authorship

OCaml-R was initially written by Maxence Guesdon. It was a rather simple binding that was used essentially by feeding strings to the R interpreter parser and evaluation function, and providing data conversion functions for simple R types. This was version 0.1 of OCaml-R.

Version 0.2, is essentially an almost complete rewrite by Guillaume Yziquel providing tight integration with the R library. It can dissect R values to expose their internal structures to OCaml (though this shouldn’t be the most useful aspect, nor the recommended way to use this binding), it construct R calls by building up R values directly, integrates OCaml’s and R’s garbage collectors (though somewhat poorly), chains R exceptions back to Objective Caml, and provides static initialisation of the R interpreter.

Starting 2012, Philippe Veber took over the maintainance.

Licenced under the GPL version 3.