The engine function has one argument options: the
source code of the current chunk is in
options$code. Usually we can call external
programs to run the code via system.
Other chunk options are also contained in this argument,
e.g. options$echo and options$eval, etc. In most cases, options$engine can be directly used
in command line to execute the code, e.g. python
or ruby, but sometimes we may want to specify the
path of the engine program, in which case we can pass it
through the engine.path option. For example,
engine='ruby', engine.path='/usr/bin/ruby1.9.1'.
Additional command line arguments can be passed through
options$engine.opts, e.g. engine='ruby',
engine.opts='-v'.