Hi all,

Reticulate is an R package for interfacing between R and Python. It allows accessing objects in a Python session from R and vice versa. See https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/ for more info about it.

I've written a small patch for using reticulate from org-babel. It allows creating a source block of lang "reticulate", which behaves as Python for font highlighting and editing, but is executed in an R session via reticulate.

I'm wondering whether this should go into org-mode, or whether to package this separately. I'm also curious whether this would be useful to anyone here. Any feedback is appreciated.

The main advantage of reticulate is being able to access Python objects directly from R and vice versa, without having to write them to a separate file or pass them through the ":var" header argument. For example, we could do the following:

#+begin_src reticulate :session
  import pandas as pd

  fib = [0, 1]
  for _ in range(10):
      fib.append(fib[-1] + fib[-2])

  df = pd.DataFrame({
      "i": list(range(len(fib))),
      "F_i": fib
  })
#+end_src

#+begin_src R :session :results graphics value file :file fig.png
  library(reticulate)
  with(py$df, plot(i, F_i))
#+end_src

Reticulate source blocks support both "value" and "output" results, and even supports graphics with matplotlib. It's primarily intended to be used in sessions, and the ":session" header argument should match between reticulate and R source blocks.

Cheers,
Jack