R Packages and Environments

RProvider currently accesses the globally installed R, as specified by the R_HOME environment variable. A near-term aim is for the provider to access a local renv-based package environment, but this requires further development.

Accessing packages

RProvider discovers the packages installed in your R installation and their functions and lazy data available as packages under the RProvider root namespace.

Packages are not loaded when their namesapce is opened. If your package requires loading for side-effects, load it using R.library("somelib").

Installing packages

Currently you need to load up a real R session, then install the package via install.packages. You will then need to restart your IDE because the set of installed packages is discovered when RProvider first loads.

Q. I have a package installed and it is not showing up

The most likely cause is that RProvider is using a different R installation from the one you updated. See installation for more information.

Function and Package names

There are a couple of mismatches between allowed identifiers between R and F#:

Dots in names

It is pretty common in R to use a dot character in a name, because the character has no special meaning. We remap dots to underscore, and underscore to a double-underscore. So for example, data.frame() becomes R.data_frame().

Names that are reserved F# keywords

Some package and function names are reserved words in F#. For these, you will need to quote them using double-backquotes. Typically, the IDE will do this for you. A good example is the base package, which will require an open statement where "base" is double-back-quoted.