[Rd] Overriding axis formatting with custom Axis method, Axis.numeric etc

[Sklyar, Oleg (MI London)]

Dear Prof Ripley,

thank you for your suggestions, they are as always very insightful!
Although, anybody can miss a point or two as I just did in namespaces.
Is the following correct?

Until redefined in the current namespace, plot.default (and all other
plot.* methods) being defined in 'graphics' calls Axis.default also
defined in 'graphics' and it is pointless to redefine Axis.default
without redefining plot.default in the same namespace? It worked for me
with Axis.numeric simply because the latter matches better than
Axis.default and it is not defined in 'graphics'.

So the question is: is there any obvious way around to redefine axis
formatting to be used with all plot.* methods in the current namespace
avoiding duplicating all the plot.* methods along with writing new
Axis.* methods?

Another understanding issue: it looks like I do really need to import
all plot methods, copy and paste the code for them and export them again
to make the whole idea work. I.e. it is not sufficient to simply
importFrom(graphics, plot.default); define Axis.default;
export(plot.default, Axis.default) in order to make it work. It is also
not sufficient to have something like plot.default =
graphics::plot.default in package code. In fact, to make it work I had
to copy and paste the full implementation of plot.default (although
without altering a single character). Am I missing something obvious? 

> Axis() is an S3 generic, not an S4 generic, so it does not 
> make sense to me to talk about 'signatures'.  It is in the 
> graphics namespace, so you cannot redefine it for use by plot.default.

Well, I would assume that default, POSIXct, POSIXlt and Date are kind of
S3 signatures for Axis (Axis.*) But thanks for hinting at "methods",
this was indeed what I needed.

Regards,
Oleg

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08)
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

locale:
LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=C;LC_MO
NETARY=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_NAME=
C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATI
ON=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] rcompgen_0.1-17


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