[Rd] S4 Objects [Sec=Unclassified]

[Martin Morgan]

Hi Troy --

Troy Robertson wrote:
> I am new to R programming but have dived into a medium sized modelling software development project.
> 
> Having come from a Java OO background I have a couple of questions about S4 objects.
> 
> 
> 
> Is there a way to make S4 slots (and methods) private and hence force the use of accessor methods?


No, except by convention (e.g., 'don't directly access slots
name-mangled in this way'; non-package code must never directly access
slots')

> 
> 
> 
> Is there a straight-forward way to implement pass-by-reference for method parameters?
> 
> I am currently returning and overwritting updated objects which is clunky and costly and would like a more efficient way of doing this.

no, copy-on-change is the most common semantic in R; using an
'environment' provides some flexibility, but use with S4 introduces
twists. See this concurrent thread

  https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-June/200038.html

(my 2 cents:) embracing rather than avoiding the paradigm might lead to
different designs, e.g., 'column-oriented' (an S4 instance representing
an entire table) rather than row-oriented (an S4 instance for each row)
data structures.


> 
> 
> Can anyone point me to some useful texts on S4 programming apart from the following:
> 
> Chambers - Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R
> 
> Venables - S Programming
> 

Gentleman, R Programming for Bioinformatics.

Hope that helps.

Martin
> 
> 
> Thanks heaps
> 
> 
> 
> Troy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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