Dear R-users,
I have very recently started learning about object-oriented programming
in R. I am far from being an expert in programming, although I do have
an elementary C++ background.
Please take a look at these lines of code.
some.data = data.frame(V1 = 1:5, V2 = 6:10) ;
p.plot = ggplot(data=some.data,aes(x=V1, y=V2)) ;
class(p.plot) ;
[1] "ggplot"
My understanding is that the object p.plot belongs to the "ggplot"
class. However, a new class definition like
setClass("AClass", representation(mFirst = "numeric", mSecond =
"ggplot")) ;
yields the warning
Warning message:
In .completeClassSlots(ClassDef, where) :
undefined slot classes in definition of "AClass": mSecond(class
"ggplot")
The ggplot object is also a list :
is.list(p.plot)
[1] TRUE
So, I guess I could identify mSecond as being a list.
However, I don't understand why "ggplot" is not considered a valid slot
type. I thought setClass() was analogous to the class declaration in
C++, but I guess I might be wrong. Would anyone care to provide
additional explanations about this?
I decided to explore object-oriented programming in R so that I could
organize the output from my analysis in a more rigorous fashion and then
define custom methods that would yield relevant output. However, I'm
starting to wonder if this aspect is not better suited for package
builders. R lists are already very powerful and convenient templates.
Although it wouldn't be as elegant, I could define functions that would
take lists outputted by the different steps of my analysis and do what I
want with them. I'm wondering what the merits of both approaches in the
context of R would be. If anyone has any thoughts about this, I'd be
most glad to read them.
Cheers,
--
*Luc Villandré*
/Biostatistician
McGill University Health Center -
Montreal Children's Hospital Research Institute/
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