R.oo (version 1.7.5)

R.oo-package: Package R.oo

Description

Methods and classes for object-oriented programming in R with or without references. Large effort has been made on making definition of methods as simple as possible with a minimum of maintenance for package developers. The package has been developed since 2001 and is now considered very stable. This is a cross-platform package implemented in pure R that defines standard S3 classes without any tricks. Please note that the Rdoc syntax/grammar used to convert Rdoc comments in code into Rd files is not strictly defined and is modified by the need of the author. Ideally, there will be a well defined Rdoc language one day.

Installation and updates

To install this package do install.packages("R.oo") To get the "devel" version, see http://www.braju.com/R/.

Dependancies and other requirements

This package requires a standard Rinstallation and the R.methodsS3 package.

To get started

To get started,It is very useful to understand that:

1. ThesetMethodS3() function, which is defined in theR.methodsS3package (used to be part ofR.oo), is nothing but a conveniency wrapper for setting up S3 methods, and automatically create an S3 generic function, if missing. For more information, see the help ofR.methodsS3.
2. TheObjectclass is a top-level "root" class that provides support forreference variables. Any class inheriting from this class supports reference variables.
3. TheObjectclass is basically a wrapper around anenvironment, which some additional accessors etc. It is the environment data type that provides the "emulation" of reference variables - the Object class structure makes it easier to extends this class and adds some level of coding protection. The Object class features is not intended for referencing individual elements of basicRdata types, but rather for the whole variable of such. For instance, you can reassign a whole matrixXpart of the object this way, but you cannot reassignX[1,1]without creating a completely new copy.

Further readings

For a detailed introduction to the package see [1] (part of the package distribution).

How to cite this package

Whenever using this package, please cite [1] as @INPROCEEDINGS{BengtssonH_2003, author = {Henrik Bengtsson}, title = {The {R.oo} package - Object-Oriented Programming with References Using Standard {R} Code}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing (DSC 2003)}, year = {2003}, editor = {Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch and Achim Zeileis}, address = {Vienna, Austria}, month = {March}, issn = {1609-395X}, howpublished = {http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/}, }

License

The releases of this package is licensed under LGPL version 2.1 or newer.

References

[1] H. Bengtsson, The R.oo package - Object-Oriented Programming with References Using Standard R Code, In Kurt Hornik, Friedrich Leisch and Achim Zeileis, editors, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing (DSC 2003), March 20-22, Vienna, Austria. http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/DSC-2003/Proceedings/

See Also

People interested in R.oo may also be interested in packages proto and mutatr.