[R] A primitive OO in R -- where next?

[S Ellison]

R OO is documented for S3 classes under section 5 (Object-oriented
programming) in the R language definition.

I guess the issue is somewhat philosophial as to how you use it. 

R philosophy _mostly_ separates data from operations on data, so the OO
model provides classes for data and essentially separate methods that
apply to those classes. This is the kind of model sometimes called a
'visitor pattern'. An alternative is to include operations on the data
within the data object, which sometimes has advantages if you want to
simplify the look of code for things like display (instead of a display
method for each class, one effectively sends a mesage to any object of
the form "display yourself here"). In practice, of course, one ends up
writing class-specific operations code; the difference is pretty much
where it's stored.

On balance there seems to me a rationale for a statistician to separate
data from the operations formed on it; one collects and curates data
carefuly, so it as a kind of lifecycle of its own that is unrelated to
mathematical operations performed on it. 

But I have allowed _data_ objects to include functions or at least
function names when it is a necessary part of the description of the
data. For example, in some of our interlaboratory studies labs give
uncertainty information in the form of a variance or interval, but may
additionally tell us what the assumed distribution is (eg Normal, t,
lognormal etc). It then makes sense to have the distribution as part of
the data. For these functions, the root name (norm, t, etc)_ suffices in
conjunction with do.call, but to generalise completely, one can consider
allowing a user to specify the distribution as (say) some arbitrary
density function or density/probability family. (It's pretty rare that
we'd need that, but hey - thinking ahead and all that). That would
generate data which in part consisted of a function describing the
(assumed) associated distribution. 

Steve Ellison

>>> Ted Harding <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk> 12/05/2010 22:48:17 >>>
Greetings All,

Out of curiosity, I've just done a very primitive experiment:

  Obj <- list(Fun=sum, Dat=c(1,2,3,4))
  Obj$Fun(Obj$Dat)
  # [1] 10

That sort of thing (much more sophisticated) must be documented
mind-blowingly somewhere. Where?

Where I stand right now: The above (and its immediately obvious
generalisations, like Obj$Fun<-cos) is all I know about it so far.

Ted.

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Date: 12-May-10                                       Time: 22:48:14
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