Thanks to everyone for the responses so far. I didn't know about setBreakpoint, mlocal, or proto before.
I think I'll try using proto a lot more and see if that fixes most of my problems. It appeals to me for two bad reasons: I had run across proto when reading the code to ggplot2 earlier but didn't know the purpose before (and I like ggplot2 and plyr, so Hadley's endorsement carries some weight with me). Also it uses an explicit passing of the object to instances of that object---it's similar to Python's self, and I'm a big fan of Python. Anyway, so much for rationality. I find it interesting that everyone seems to run into this issue, and everyone solves it in their own way. I hadn't known that Mark's mvbutils and Duncan's setBreakpoint (how do I get this function?) existed before. I also like Mark Kimpel's trick, which appeals to a simple-minded person like me. Either R needs to expand it's standard library, or there should be a standard guide on what you really need to work productively. I'd have a hard time in R without ggplot2, plyr, RUnit, perhaps proto now, and a few other functions and modules, but it's taken a while to figure out what I needed. It could be in 6 months I'll discover something else and realize that I've been wasting my time all along. Anyway, thanks again for all the responses! -- Ben ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
