Apologies for asking something that is probably very obvious, i just started with S4 classes and i guess i am not finding documentation that lays out the grammar rules and gives enough examples. I understand that main method of writing a member function is to write a generic function and setMethod for this particular class. This, however, presumes that there is "virtuality" for this function, i.e. it could be used with other inherited classes . Truth is, many, if not most of my functions don't have virtuality in mind. I want to write them inside classes to achieve incapsulaton only -- use class member data without passing it as parameters or making global to a bunch of functions and have some specific class member functions that don't pollute a global namespace and can be called only for a particular class. This is what enclosured do in R. Is there some obvious way of setting this environment local to a class and without writing generic functions that i am missing? Would appreciate any pointers -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/S4-generic-functions-methods-vs-enclosures-tp3430950p3430950.html Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
S4 generic functions/methods vs enclosures
3 messages · John Chambers, andre zege
Look at ?ReferenceClasses for this OOP paradigm in R, which is quite different from the functional paradigm of S4 methods.
On 4/6/11 7:54 AM, A Zege wrote:
Apologies for asking something that is probably very obvious, i just started with S4 classes and i guess i am not finding documentation that lays out the grammar rules and gives enough examples. I understand that main method of writing a member function is to write a generic function and setMethod for this particular class. This, however, presumes that there is "virtuality" for this function, i.e. it could be used with other inherited classes . Truth is, many, if not most of my functions don't have virtuality in mind. I want to write them inside classes to achieve incapsulaton only -- use class member data without passing it as parameters or making global to a bunch of functions and have some specific class member functions that don't pollute a global namespace and can be called only for a particular class. This is what enclosured do in R. Is there some obvious way of setting this environment local to a class and without writing generic functions that i am missing? Would appreciate any pointers -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/S4-generic-functions-methods-vs-enclosures-tp3430950p3430950.html Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
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This looks awesome -- it is precisely what i wanted. I have started hacking with passing around environments to simulate behavior of classes i was after, but this is so much neater. Reference classes seem to do precisely what i wanted. Thank you very much. -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/S4-generic-functions-methods-vs-enclosures-tp3430950p3431755.html Sent from the R devel mailing list archive at Nabble.com.