[IPython-dev] cell magics

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 17 February 2013 00:14, Jason Grout <jason-sage at creativetrax.com> wrote:

> Cool.  I didn't know that.  But if k was a list (for some other
> parameter), and you were trying to sub it in, you'd have to convert the
> list to a string, then convert it back in the decorator.  That's a
> little silly.
>

In theory, but I don't think we've ever had such a case. The %%R magic has
something roughly similar - you can pass in variables including arrays, like

%%R -i myvar
code...

In that case, the magic looks in the namespaces for 'myvar', so it doesn't
have to be converted to a string and back. Arguably you could pull the
variable in more elegantly with your proposal, something like:

%R(input=[myvar])
code

But we also use the name to assign the converted variable to in R, so you'd
need to provide that separately:

%R(input={'myvar':myvar})
code

That is slightly more flexible, but most of the time it's going to involve
unnecessary repetition, in addition to the extra punctuation.

Thomas
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