Thanks a lot for the reply Henrik.
I do not know what was the motivation of R developers to go for yet another OO design, but I wish the designers would have thought of ways to interface this design to the other designs.
As a wrapper developer, I like packages like R.oo not because it uses S3, but for this reason that it 'hides' the OO design of R -- I don't mind if the hidden design is S3, S4 or maybe S5!
However, in S3 you can create a "generic" generic function by not specifying
arguments but only '...' - this way any methods can take any arguments (and
you don't force your argument names onto other developer's).
So why did they go a step backward in S4 and remov this feature?
So, the above is just a sketch that might or might not work. I think you best shot is indeed to use S3, because it is a bit more flexible; S4 is probably too rigid for this purpose.
It seems to me by making the parser a bit less dynamic and putting some limitations this could be done.
BTW, I think it would be nice if you can develope an easy way to define wrappers for C++ and other similar language! [Just don't reinvent the wheel.]
I assume you mean C++ wrappers for R. I believe before touching a project like that, first some issues must be resolved in R. The problem is not how to automate the parser, the problem is that OO design of R lacks some important equivalents of OO designs like C++. Another problem could be that some R developers believe that the previous is not a problem :) Once a flexible and stable interface between the two designs is estabilished, parsing may be perfomed in the classical way.
______________________________________________ R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
