[Rd] "Incompatible methods" for overloaded operator

[Hadley Wickham]

Hi all,

Any ideas about this?  As far as I can tell it should work - and I
don't understand why it's ok when run outside of a package.

Hadley

On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:41 PM, Winston Chang <winstonchang1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to overload an operator, and I'm running into a strange problem.
> It happens when I install and load the package, but not when I simply
> source() the code.
>
> I'm defining + for two classes. The R code looks like this:
> #' @export
> #' @method "+" a
> `+.a` <- function (x1, x2) {
>    message("Running custom + function")
> }
>
> #' @export
> #' @method "+" b
> `+.b` <- `+.a`
>
> In some cases I do a+b, and in other cases, I do b+b. I'm told that the +.a
> and +.b functions must be identical to avoid the error about "Incompatible
> methods". (In the actual code, the overloaded + function checks the classes
> of x1 and x2, and then sends them off to other functions.)
>
> This is the NAMESPACE file:
> S3method("+",a)
> S3method("+",b)
>
> I've put the code up at https://github.com/wch/badadd.
>
>
>
> If I just cut and paste the function definitions to my R session, it works
> fine:
> x + y
> # Running + function
> # NULL
>
>
> However, if I install and load the package, it gives a warning about
> incompatible methods, and then seems to fall back to the arithmetic +
> operator:
> library(badadd)
> x + y
> # [1] 3
> # attr(,"class")
> # [1] "a"
> # Warning message:
> # Incompatible methods ("+.a", "+.b") for "+"
>
>
> Is this expected behavior? And if so, is there a workaround?
> -Winston
>
>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/