julia_assign assigns a value to a name in julia with automatic type conversion.
julia_assign(x, value)
if (identical(Sys.getenv("AUTO_JULIA_INSTALL"), "true")) { ## julia_setup is quite time consuming
## doing initialization and automatic installation of Julia if necessary
julia_setup(installJulia = TRUE)
julia_assign("x", 2)
julia_assign("rsqrt", sqrt)
}