Some changes committed today to the r-devel (1.6.0) version of the methods package: 1. The function setOldClass has been added as per the green book, p. 450. The point in this case is not conversion as in the green book so much as allowing old-style classes to be included in signatures given to setMethod. This worked before (with a warning), but old-style inheritance couldn't be picked up. Using setOldClass(c("chron", "times")) should let "times" be included in signatures with the method selected for an object of class "chron". 2. Some heuristics have been added to warn about what appear to be mistakes in writing generic functions (e.g., wrong name, no call to standardGeneric). The consequences of such errrors can be obscure. As with all heuristics, possibily warnings will occur when not appropriate. Let me know. 3. The function promptMethods() has been revised to generate aliases for individual methods, according to a proposed convention: setMethod("f", c("character", "numeric"), .....) would correspond to an entry in the documentation file of \alias{f,character,numeric-method} (The help function doesn't yet know about this specifically.) -- John M. Chambers jmc@bell-labs.com Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies office: (908)582-2681 700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2C-282 fax: (908)582-3340 Murray Hill, NJ 07974 web: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~jmc -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._