[R] Chapters

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Marshall Feldman wrote:

> I'm surprised this isn't a FAQ, but I searched all over and could not find a
> reference to it.

I have never seen in mentioned before.  R is not an implementation of S4 
as described in Chambers (1998), so I do not know where you got the idea 
that was relevant.  (The methods package in R is an implementation of 
something close to the class system described in that book, but R can be 
used without the methods package.)

> Chambers (1998) makes repeated references to "Chapters" in S (e.g., p. 6),
> but I can find no reference to "Chapters" in R. Since Chapters were not used
> in earlier versions of S, I'm wondering if R uses them or not. If it does,
> how does one get them to work? I've been unable to do so.

The closest analogues are

1) packages
2) using different working directories.

Since R does not store objects on file and chapters are directories with 
collections of stored objects (and other things, including DLLs), the 
analogues cannot be very close.

-- 
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