On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Marsland, John wrote: > I'm sure that many people are in the same position as me in that they are > trying to write packages and code that is vaguely "future proof". > > Would it be possible to get some guidance on how the R-core team see the > evolution of the "base" package with regard to s4 methods. > > There seem to be quite a lot of inconsistencies between s3 and s4 methods > and classes currently and this (I'm sure) is only to be expected in a period > of transition. eg POSIXlt vs POSIXt and POSIXct. And there seem like dozens
Those are S3 classes, and there is nothing transitional about them! There are no S4 classes in `base R' that I am aware of to be inconsistent. Are you sure you understand the difference? > of print methods to convert First you need to define S4 classes, and there are currently no moves to do that for the statistical modelling software, for example. > - it's not an enviable task and I'm sure it will > take time! ... if indeed you do see R being purged of s3 by some point in > the future. We are still using S3 classes designed a decade ago, and I expect to be still using them in another decade. I even have S4 versions of some of them (e.g. lda, multinom) and no plans to use those in R. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
