Hello,

I have again a "good practices"/programming theory question regarding data.frames.

One of the fundamental objects that I use is the data frame with a particular set of columns that I would fill or get information from, and an entire system would revolve around getting information from or putting information to such data.frame.

On a different OOP programming language I would be tempted to create a class that would "wrap-around" that data.frame and create "getters" and "setters" methods that would return whatever information I need. I started doing that using S4.

Does anyone have examples of packages that use that approach or any suggestions?  It just seems to me that a class/object would be a better idea because it would create a single, hopefully well validated way to access information and edit the fundamental data.frame object, which would be helpful if there are several programmers on the team and/or if some of the data.frame manipulations are not straightforward and are best left encapsulated in a method of a class, and then have people use that method.  I would just like to know if there are reasons not do it that way and if there are any examples of packages that use that approach and that I can learn from.

Thanks in advance,

Ramiro

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