[Rd] S4 generic functions/methods vs enclosures

A Zege andre.zege at gmail.com
Wed Apr 6 16:54:45 CEST 2011


Apologies for asking something that is probably very obvious, i just started
with S4 classes and i guess i am not finding documentation that lays out the
grammar rules and gives enough examples. 

I understand that main method of writing a member function is to write a
generic function and setMethod for this particular class. This, however,
presumes that there is "virtuality" for this function, i.e. it could be used
with other inherited classes . Truth is, many, if not most of my functions
don't have virtuality in mind. I want to write them inside classes to
achieve incapsulaton only -- use class member data without passing it as
parameters or making global to a bunch of functions and have some specific
class member functions that don't pollute a global namespace and can be
called only for a particular class. This is what enclosured do in R. Is
there some obvious way of setting this environment local to a class and 
without writing generic functions that i am missing?


Would appreciate any pointers 


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