This is unfortunately reinforced by the "(Not So) Short Introduction to S4 Object Oriented Programming in R" - I wouldn't recommend that document to learn about S4.
The most important thing to get about OO in R is that methods belong to generic functions, not like classes, as in most other programming languages. If you don't get that, you are really going to struggle with S3 and S4 and you will wonder what on earth the designers of R were thinking when they created them. Hadley On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 3:42 PM, William Dunlap <wdun...@tibco.com> wrote: > I thought you were thinking of the R class system (the S3 and S4 ones > anyway) as if it were C++'s. It is quite different. > > Bill Dunlap > Spotfire, TIBCO Software > wdunlap tibco.com > > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Greg Minshall [mailto:minsh...@umich.edu] >> Sent: Friday, February 15, 2013 1:37 PM >> To: William Dunlap >> Cc: r-help@r-project.org >> Subject: Re: 2 setGeneric's, same name, different method signatures >> >> William, >> >> > and here mention "intra-class name clashes" (I'm not sure what you >> > mean by this). >> >> sorry, i meant, in something like C++, if i have a class Foo and you >> have a class Bar, then i can invent whatever method names/signatures i >> want, independent of whatever method names/signatures *you* want. *i* >> just need to make sure i don't introduce incompatible methods with the >> same name/signature *within* Foo. >> >> >> cheers, Greg > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Chief Scientist, RStudio http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.