[R] Attributes or list programming "efficiency"

[Gabor Grothendieck]

The key difference is inheritance.

Objects consisting of data frames with attributes, including a class attribute
such as c("myclass", "data.frame), can inherit data frame methods but a list
with a data frame component will require entirely new methods to be constructed
for everything.




On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton at gene.com> wrote:
> R-Fellow Travellers:
>
> Asked from the perspective of a software development amateur ...
>
> Suppose one wishes to create data structures that have both data and
> metadata -- e.g. a data.frame and details about where, when, and by whom the
> data were gathered (specifics not important here).
>
> 1. Is there any inherent processing advantage in R in representing this as a
> list that contains both the data and metadata as components vs as a
> data.frame with the metadata as attributes?
>
> 2. Is there a compelling software architecture argument to favor one vs the
> other?
>
> I suspect the answer is no in both cases, but I thought I'd ask. This seems
> to be mainly relevant for S3 programming, as in S4 one might stick the info
> into different slots (if one wishes to dispatch on them).
>
> Cheers to all,
>
> Bert Gunter
> Genentech
>
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