[Bioc-sig-seq] match, vmatch

[James Bullard]

I suppose I could go digging through the code and determine why, but I  
am curious why there need be a match and a vmatch. This seems to me to  
be one of the glaring advantages of R's system of generics and  
multiple dispatch, i.e. that you can dispatch on both pattern and  
subject and therefore no need to have the two different names match  
and vmatch which pollute the namespace.

Out of curiosity I am wondering why this had to be done. Additionally,  
the help pages leave me a little less than satisfied in regards to why  
there is a matchPDict and matchPattern; It seems again that the use  
case is the same, i.e. match some stuff. I can fully understand that  
the speed of these things might be at the heart of these design  
choices, but that seems unfortunate, and again I am wondering if  
dispatch could be used so that we don't have so many generics to sort  
through.

So my main question is why isn't dispatch being used to choose which  
matchPattern to call and then just have that be the single entry point  
to fast string matching.

thanks, jim