[BioC] A story about IRanges::GappedRanges ... how does it end?

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hello,

It being Sunday and all, here's a little story that I've got to tell
(apologies in advance for indulging in some navel gazing):

Once upon a time (yesterday) I found myself implementing a
GappedRanges class[1] because I wanted to "talk about" and manipulate
distances/etc. between two points that are aligned to "genomic" space,
but really come from "transcriptome" space (so, I wanted to keep track
of introns and things and subtract them away in results from calls to
width() and its ilk).

I thought I was being really clever and was liking how it was coming
together. I was testing in all sorts of manner, and when I tried to
have a column of a DataFrame hold my GappedRanges objects, I got some
funny errors -- something about some "cnirl" slot.

After some head scratching, I went digging through the IRanges source
code -- lo and behold I found a GappedRanges class .. and it has a
`cnirl` slot! I paused for a moment to recognize that whoever saw the
need for this class and thought to implement it must surely be a
prodigy in the truest sense of the word ...

When my day dream had passed, I got to wondering how it was that I
haven't stumbled across this class until now. I realized that no one
really talks about GappedRanges on the mailing list(s) and there's no
real mention of it in the IRangesOverview vignette. An `svn log` on
the file shows no activity on it since December 2009, so I was
wondering if this class was on its way out? Maybe someone thought it
was a good idea to write it (greetings, kindred spirit) and has since
come to the conclusion that maybe it's unnecessary (in which case, I'd
appreciate some wisdom about that to save me some time :-)

I was planning on implementing a findOverlaps method against
GappedRanges that act "the normal way" but exclude any overlaps that
fall within the gapped portion of the ranges ... but, I wanted to see
where GappedRanges stands now before I proceed (and maybe just doing a
findOverlaps against a GRangesList is close to the same thing).
Perhaps I'd just be duplicating someone else's work, who's already
found a better way to deal with the use cases this class (I think)
would work well for.

Anyway ... I was just curious about what's going on with the
GappedRanges class. I find it's a natural fit for some things, even
though I would grant you that you could probably twist a GRangesList
into doing something similar.

Thanks,
-steve

[1] My (partial) GappedRanges implementation:
http://github.com/lianos/GenomicFeaturesX/blob/master/R/GappedRanges.R

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact