[CWB] Linking CWB and R

[Sylvain LOISEAU]

Hi,

I'm interested in accessing cwb directly from R, since cwb data structures are vectors and may be very efficiently managed from within R.

I have made a small R implementation of the client interface, allowing for cwb to be accessed through socket connection.

I would be very interested, before going further, in your comments and opinions about another project : liking cwb and R though call to a CWB C library. A CWB library could 
be linked to a R module (and automatically installed with this module). Rather than being communicated one by one via socket, the vector elements produced by CWB would 
be represented in C, with a light extension to the existing code, and wrapped with a R vector. Such R vector would simply give access to the original data, without copying 
any data structure.

I'm sure some of you have already thought about that and maybe there is well known drawbacks or misconception in this project.

Best regards,
Sylvain Loiseau