R-alpha: class for chisquare tests; Thoughts on print & summary

[Martin Maechler]

Kurt,
I think we hopefully are coming to an agreement that

	1)  your ctest collection should make its way into 'R core'
		((and you are the one who can make it happen now ..))
	2)  it should remain S-plus downward compatible as much as
	    reasonably possible.

My conclusions:
	a. keep class 'htest'
	b. extend  print.htest  (AND  summary.htest !)
	   to make it possible to display your extra info.
        b2. Yes, add extra arguments to print.htest / summary.htest to
	   control this behavior.
	 [this is also done for the correlation matrix
	  in print.summary.lm in S (not yet in R ..)]

alternatively, you would make a new class  'chisqtest' but give your test
results BOTH classes  
	class(res) <- c("chisqtest","htest")
Such that you can use 'htest' methods in general, and just one
	print.chisqtest
in particular.



General note on  'print' (and 'summary') methods:
~~~~~~~~~~~~      =====     
1) I think we should keep to the S convention that EVERY print method
   semantically acts as

    print.foo <- function(x,.........) {

	    .........

	    invisible(x)
    }

	[[a few days ago, I've patched print.lm (?I think) in order to do this]]

2) For summary, there are two approaches 
   
	A. Just print summary information  AND  return something useful.

	B. Don't print anything in summary.foo but return an object of 
	   CLASS  'summary.foo'
	   
	   AND write a method  print.summary.foo  
	   which nicely prints the  summary.foo information and
		[see remark '1)' on "print"] invisibly returns its object.

   Approach 'B' is THE way to go useful for "big" things like 'lm'.
   IMHO it should be used in general as soon as quite a bit of "computing"
   is involved ("computing" is NOT computer intensive; just things that are
   tedious to re-type).
	
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