pcCycle serves as both a constructor and extractor of cycle
objects. It is meant to just do the right thing, relieving the user
from the burden of specifying a particular cycle class.
If x is numeric it constructs a cycle object with period
x and additional properties as specified by the other
arguments. If x is a character string, it is taken to be the
name of one of the builtin cycles.
pcCycle can be used to create a modified version of a cycle
object and/or convert it to another cycle type. This is done by
providing a cycle object as argument x, i.e. one inheriting
from "BasicCycle".
If x inherits from "Cyclic", pcCycle returns its
cycle component.
Argument type should be rarely needed, except maybe to
conveniently force conversion of the builtin type to an ordinary type.
The descriptions of the individual methods in section Methods give
some further specific details.
BuiltinCycle is a convenience function to create objects from
builtin cycle classes by specifying the number of seasons. The
builtin cycle classes are esseintially fixed, except that which season
is considered first can be changed using argument first. If
other modifications are desired, convert the returned builtin cycle
object to class "SimpleCycle". This can be done also in the
call to BuiltinCycle() by specifying coerce = TRUE.
By default, BuiltinCycle throws an error if there is no builtin
class with the requested number of seasons. Set argument stop
to FALSE to create an object from class "BareCycle" instead
(and it will be converted to "SimpleCycle" if coerce =
TRUE). Argument stop is mainly for programming.