[R-pkg-devel] tibbles are not data frames

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 10:35 AM, Joris Meys <Joris.Meys at ugent.be> wrote:
> > I don't like the dropping of dimensions either. That doesn't change the
> > fact that a tibble reacts different from a data.frame. So tibbles do not
> > inherit correctly from the class data.frame, and it can thus be argued that
> > it's against OOP paradigms to pretend tibbles inherit from the class
> > data.frame.
>
> I have yet to see an OOP system in which a subclass cannot override the methods
> of its superclass. Not only is this in line with OOP paradigms, it is
> actually one of the essential OOP features.

Not if this compromises type safety. Formal OOP languages enforce the
signature matches when you override a method. The fact that R is
dynamically typed puts this responsibility at the developer. The fact
that tibble [ returns a data frame where it's parent class returns an
atomic vector violates this principle, resulting in the obvious type
errors where tibbles are used as data frames.