R devel - Jul 2021 - S3 dispatch does not work for generics defined inside an environment

Taras,
> P.S. If you are wondering what I am trying to achieve here ? we have a
> very large codebase and I am trying to use environments as a type of
> ?poor man?s namespaces? to organize code in a modular fashion. But of
> course it?s all pointless if I can?t get the generics to work
> reliably.
i'm not knowledgeable about S3.  but, a different way to try to
modularize large code bases is to split them into separate packages.
just in case you hadn't already thought about, and rejected, that idea.

cheers, Greg

Hi Greg, 

That was my original plan as well, but managing and deploying dozens of little
packages that are all under active development is a nightmare even with
devtools. Just too much overhead, not to mention that coming up with names that
would not have namespace conflicts was getting silly.

In the end, I wrote a package that implements lightweight python-like modules
for R and that has really improved my workflow. I hope to publish this package
later this year after I have cleaned it up a bit.

Thanks, 

Taras
> On 1 Jul 2021, at 05:55, Greg Minshall <minshall at umich.edu> wrote:
> 
> Taras,
> 
>> P.S. If you are wondering what I am trying to achieve here ? we have a
>> very large codebase and I am trying to use environments as a type of
>> ?poor man?s namespaces? to organize code in a modular fashion. But of
>> course it?s all pointless if I can?t get the generics to work
>> reliably.
> 
> i'm not knowledgeable about S3.  but, a different way to try to
> modularize large code bases is to split them into separate packages.
> just in case you hadn't already thought about, and rejected, that idea.
> 
> cheers, Greg