R: Package R.oo

R.oo-package {R.oo}

R Documentation

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")

Dependencies and other requirements

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

To get started

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

The setMethodS3() function, which is defined in the R.methodsS3 package (used to be part of R.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 of R.methodsS3.
The Object class is a top-level "root" class that provides support for reference variables. Any class inheriting from this class supports reference variables.
The Object class is basically a wrapper around an environment, 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 basic R data types, but rather for the whole variable of such. For instance, you can reassign a whole matrix X part of the object this way, but you cannot reassign X[1,1] without creating a completely new copy.

How to cite this package

Whenever using this package, please cite [1] as

Bengtsson, H. The R.oo package - Object-Oriented Programming with References Using
Standard R Code, Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed
Statistical Computing (DSC 2003), ISSN 1609-395X, Hornik, K.; Leisch, F. & Zeileis,
A. (ed.), 2003

License

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

Author(s)

Henrik Bengtsson

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. https://www.r-project.org/conferences/DSC-2003/Proceedings/