Extending [ method to S4 class and drop argument (PR#9211)
Or more in the spirit of method dispatch, and to get some insight into why this design decision is not a bug:
setClass("test",representation(x="character"))
[1] "test"
setMethod("[",
+ signature(x="test", drop="missing"),
+ function(x, i, j, ..., drop) {
+ cat("here\n")
+ callNextMethod(x, i, j, ..., drop=TRUE)
+ })
[1] "["
setMethod("[","test",function(x, i, j, ..., drop) {
+ cat("there\n")
+ print(drop)
+ })
[1] "["
a = new("test",x="fred")
a[1]
here there [1] TRUE 'drop' is 'missing', and 'missing' satisfies the implicit 'ANY' condition in the signature of the original method. With this insight, the design decision to 'ignore' the default argument seems appropriate to me -- developers implementing the generic might well want to dispatch on it, since after all it is in the generic signature. This could lead to an explosion of methods if many arguments have 'default' values, but such an explosion probably points to a nice distinction between arguments-for-dispatch and arguments-for-evaluation. To tell the truth, I hadn't really understood why the error originally reported occurred, until writing the method with drop="missing" just now. Martin "Gabor Grothendieck" <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> writes:
Try this:
setClass("test",representation(x="character"))
[1] "test"
setMethod("[","test",function(x,i,j,...,drop) {
+ print(i) + if (missing(drop)) drop <- TRUE + print(drop) + }) [1] "["
a = new("test",x="fred")
a[1]
[1] 1 [1] TRUE On 9/8/06, jverzani at gmail.com <jverzani at gmail.com> wrote:
Full_Name: John Verzani
Version: 2.4.0 alpha (2006-09-05 r39134)
OS: linux, gentoo 2.6.17
Submission from: (NULL) (163.238.43.26)
When extending the "[" method to a new S4 class, the default value for the drop
argument is not being found. Here is a small example:
setClass("test",representation(x="character"))
setMethod("[","test",function(x,i,j,...,drop=TRUE) {print(i);print(drop)})
a = new("test",x="fred")
a[1]
resulting in:
[1] 1
Error in print(drop) : argument "drop" is missing, with no default
I'm expecting TRUE for the value of drop. That's correct isn't?
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