Hi all, I'm currently programming my first complete package in S4. (thanks to Christophe Genolini for the nice introduction he wrote). I have an object "Data" with a number of slots. One of those slots is "meteo". Now "Meteo" is on itself a class with again a number of slots (like rainfall, temperature,..., you get the picture).
I defined the slot "meteo" currently as a character slot, and the values refer to the names of the Meteo-objects related to that Data-object. The cleaner way would be to define the slot "meteo" as a slot of class "Meteo", but I'm not sure how that works internally. Thing is, I have multiple Data objects that refer to the same Meteo object. I am a bit afraid that when I define the slot meteo as a slot of the corresponding class, each Data object will contain a complete copy of the Meteo object it relates to. This would mean that in the memory I will end up with multiple copies of exactly the same data. Although it is cleaner, it is definitely not more efficient. My question : Am I wrong in my assumption that I will have multiple copies in the memories? If yes, is it possible to use references in a more formal way than I do now? Or is there an obvious solution I am missing here? Thank you in advance Cheers Joris ______________________________________________ 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.