Can the R console support background tasks or interrupts (event-handling)?
While working in an R console, I'd like to set up a background task that monitors a particular connection and when an event occurs, another function (an alert) is executed. Alternatively, I can set things up so that an external function simply sends an alert to R, but this seems to be the same problem: it is necessary to set up a listener. I can do this in a dedicated process of R, but I don't know if this is feasible from within a console. Also, I'm not interested in interrupting R if it is calculating a function, but alerting or interrupting if the console is merely waiting on input. Here