[Rd] attributes of environments

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 7/5/2006 3:47 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> On 7/5/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> On 7/5/2006 2:23 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

>>  I think by this time I have shown that subclassing of
>> > environments does not work yet it could if it were designed differently
>> > and furthermore there are significant problems with the workarounds.
>>
>> I don't think you've shown that subclassing of environments doesn't
>> work.  You have an example that shows that shows that R implements
>> Henrik's "Case 2" rather than his "Case 1", but as Thomas and I said,
>> that really has nothing to do with subclassing.
>>
>> Subclassing is about defining a new class, not about copying objects.
>> You can (and did!) define a new class which inherits from the
>> environment class.
> 
> But by subclassing in the way allowed one comes up with something that
> is not useful.

You haven't shown that.  Show an example where you define a new class 
that should inherit from environment but doesn't.

All you've shown so far is that when you try to change the class of an 
object to a new class, it appears that the class of another object also 
changes.  (The explanation being that they are really just different 
names for the same object.)

> That is why tcltk and Henrik's package wrap environments in lists and define
> a completely different class but by doing that they are not able to take
> advantage of inheritance.

I think they did that because they wanted explicit references to 
objects, rather than the built-in implicit ones.  I've wanted explicit 
references to things on a number of occasions too, but that's really 
unrelated to inheritance as far as I can see.

Duncan Murdoch