Re: babel results handling

[Rick Frankel <rick@rickster.com>]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 08:18:09AM -0600, Eric Schulte wrote:
> Rick Frankel <rick@rickster.com> writes:
> 
> > On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 07:37:38AM -0600, Eric Schulte wrote:
> > `sh' is probably not the best choice as a "gold standard" due to the
> > fact that it only supports STDOUT ("output" and not "value").
> >
> > Many of the languages are obviously not general purpose, or do not
> > support (like shell), wrapped values (only STDOUT), or don't generate
> > text, so consistency does not matter (e.g., css, sass, sql, sqlite,
> > plantuml, dot).
> >
> > Regardless, the attached org file is a first step an comparing the
> > result processing of some languages (specifically, sh, emacs-lisp,
> > perl and ruby), which, I think, covers a good portion of the babel use
> > of general purpose languages.
> >
> 
> This is a great file.  Thanks for generating it and sharing it.
> Although I think it would be more useful if languages were the smallest
> scale of organization rather than the largest to make cross-language
> comparison easier.

I will try it this way over the weekend. I kept going back-and-forth
with the nesting, never really liked any of the output...

> Would it be difficult to add another set of code blocks which
> automatically compare the output of these automatically generated code
> blocks, indicating when there are differences.

I'll try an add (i think Achim suggested adding it to the test
infrastructure in a later email, will take a look, but don't hold your
breath :).

> > The upshot, is that perl value results match shell value/output
> > results and emacs-lisp, python and ruby all return about the same
> > results (elisp returns the quote characters from a verbatim string).
> >
> 
> What are the perl-shell vs. python-ruby-elisp differences?

Again, Achim has covered it in a later email, but it's that sh (which
is using _output_ and not _value_), and perl (as _value_) are
post-processing the raw results through org-table-convert-region.

> If you want to use pipes to delimit data, then I'd suggest *not*
> interpreting the data as a value, but rather doing something like
> ":results verbatim drawer".  Generally pipes aren't considered to be
> table column delimiters, I'd try tabs or spaces instead.

Agreed, i was just setting up a test to compare results among
different processors.

> > Also, looking at the manual
> > (http://orgmode.org/manual/results.html#results) vs. the code, are
> > there are actually four classes of :results arguments with type broken
> > into type and format?
> >
> >      - Type :: (file list vector table scalar verbatim)
> >      - Format :: (raw html latex org code pp drawer)
> >
> 
> Yes, this does seem to be more clear.  If you're willing to supply a
> documentation patch I'd be very happy to apply it.

I will make the change this weekend -- I have commit privileges but
wanted to make sure my interpretation was correct.

rick