First of all, I haven't followed the discussion about the new/upcoming name space support in R so I do not know the purposes or requirements for it, neither its design, and I can only guess. I found the (initial?) notes by Luke Tierney on the Developers Page. Are there any other references?
Since it seems that the current implementation (R v1.6.2) of name spaces is a "trial" version and not really officially announced I though it would be better to ask my questions on this list: hist() is internally creating an object of class 'histogram' and calling plot() on this object, which will (through the S3/UseMethod mechanism) call plot.histogram(). In pre Rv1.6.x I used to overload the plot.histogram() with my own backward compatible version, which added two arguments specifying the width and offset of the bars, making it easier to have two or more histograms in the same plot. However, I noticed that since R v1.6.x the hist() -> plot() -> plot.histogram() sequence is now restricted to hist() -> plot() -> base::plot.histogram() (not explicitly). Where ever I put my redefined plot.histogram() function, i.e. before the 'base' package in the search() path, including .GlobalEnv, it is ignored when calling hist(). Question 1: Is this due to the new name space support? Question 2: Is this the intendent behavior? Question 3: If yes of Q2, then should plot.histogram() be considered a private function of the 'base' package? Of course it works if I use h <- hist(..., plot=FALSE) and call plot(h, ...) explicitly. However, I am not really interested in a workaround for this specific problem, but more in how name spaces are going to change R and if there is a well defined plan/specification at the moment. Best wishes Henrik Bengtsson Home: 201/445 Royal Parade, 3052 Parkville Office: Bioinformatics, WEHI, Parkville +61 (0)412 269 734 (cell), +61 (0)3 9345 2324 (lab), +1 (508) 464 6644 (global fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.maths.lth.se/~hb/ Time zone: +11h UTC (Sweden +1h UTC, Calif. -8h UTC) ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
