[Rd] S4 / S3 / Sweave problem

[Prof Brian Ripley]

I'm not sure what the issue being asked about here is.  The peculiar 
printing I don't see and may well be a locale issue.  (Is this UTF-8 and 
TeX has not been told so?)

The other issue is that when printing an object with attributes, there is 
no consideration of S4 classes amongst the attributes.  That was either an 
undocumented design decision or an omission.  This is different from

> print(attributes(zz))
$tsp
[1]  1 10  1

$class
[1] "ts"

$Meta
An object of class “TSmetax”
Slot "serIDs":
[1] "whatever"

Slot "ExtractionDate":
NULL

since although attributes are internally a pairlist and printed by a 
special C function, attributes() returns a list.

It would be fairly easy to include a branch for S4 objects, but there are 
ambuiguities still over what they are (I wrote up a set of questions over 
a year ago about this).  But it would seem fairly safe to send them to 
show() in the same circumstances that autoprinting does for apparently S4 
objects.

On Sun, 4 May 2008, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> I'm not sure if this as a bug or something I am doing wrong. It occurs in 
> both 2.7.0 and 2.6.2.

My guess is that it was never intended that S4 objects be used as
attributes, in the same way that one of the unanswered questions is if S4
objects should be allowed to have attributes (other than slots).

>
> require("methods")
>
> setClassUnion("OptionalPOSIXct",   c("POSIXct",   "NULL"))
>
> setClass("TSmetax",
>  representation(serIDs="character", ExtractionDate="OptionalPOSIXct" ))
>
> setGeneric("TSmetax",
>   def= function(x, ...) standardGeneric("TSmetax"))
>
> setMethod("TSmetax",   signature(x="character"),
>   definition= function(x, ...){
>       new("TSmetax", serIDs=x, ExtractionDate=Sys.time())
>       } )
>
>> z <- new("TSmetax", serIDs="whatever", ExtractionDate= NULL)
>> print(z)
> An object of class "TSmetax"
> Slot "serIDs":
> [1] "whatever"
>
> Slot "ExtractionDate":
> NULL
>
> Now if I make this an attribute of an S3 class an print, I get
>> zz <- ts(1:10)
>> attr(zz, "Meta") <- z
>> print(zz)
> Time Series:
> Start = 1
> End = 10
> Frequency = 1
> [1]  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10
> attr(,"Meta")
> <S4 Type Object>
> attr(,"serIDs")
> [1] "whatever"
> attr(,"ExtractionDate")
> `
NULL
`
> attr(,"class")
> [1] "TSmetax"
> attr(,"class")attr(,"package")
> [1] ".GlobalEnv"
>>
>
> The `
NULL
` shows up i
> shows up in the tex file generated by a vignette as
> <soh>NULL<soh> which causes  tex (pdftex) to throw an  error.
> (It also seems to mess up my mail tool, so I hope this goes through.)


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595