similar to: reference classes: question on inheritance

Dear list, I was wondering if you could help me out in clarifying something: Is it possible to use class "ANY" in slots/fields of formal classes if you a) do not want to restrict valid classes of that field and b) if you are making explicit use of class inheritance? It seems to work in simple scenarios but produces errors when class inheritance comes into play. So I was

Dear list, a while ago I posted this at r-devel but got no answers. Hope it?s okay to give it a shot again by cross-posting it here. TIA for any comments, Janko Von: Janko Thyson [mailto:janko.thyson.rstuff at googlemail.com] Gesendet: Montag, 21. Februar 2011 00:58 An: r-devel at r-project. org (r-devel at r-project.org) Betreff: Reference classes: error with missing arguments in method calls

Dear list, is it possible that method dispatch checks for superclasses/virtual classes before checking "ANY"? I'd like to build a generic initialization method for all my Reference Class (say "MyDataFrame") objects by having them inherit from class, say "MyRefClassVirtual" (which would have to be a virtual S4 class; there are no virtual Reference Classes,

Dear list, just to make sure that I understand 'unregistering' methods for S4 reference classes correctly: If I registered a method and want to 'unregister' (i.e. remove) this method again, objects/instance created of the respective class still feature the removed method until I do an explicit reassign ('my.instance <- getRefClass("Classname")$new()'), right?

Dear list, I'm wondering if the following error I'm getting is a small bug in the Reference Class paradigm or if it makes perfect sense. When you write an explicit initialize method for a Ref Class, can you then make use of '.self' WITHIN this initialize method just as you would once an object of the class has actually been initialized? Because it seems to me that you can not.

Dear list, I make use of cached objects extensively for time consuming computations and yesterday I happened to notice some very strange behavior in that respect: When I execute a given computation whose result I'd like to cache (tried both saving it as '.Rdata' and via package 'R.cache' which uses a own filetype '.Rcache'), my R session consumes about 200 MB of

Dear list, is there a shortcut-function to check whether a class is a Reference Class or not? There's something like this for S4 classes ('isS4(object)'), but I couldn't find anything regarding Ref Classes. Currently, I'm doing it this way, which is a bit clumsy: A <- setRefClass("A", fields=list(X="numeric")) a <- A$new() isRefClass <-

Dear list, I think I stumbled across a little bug with respect to the standard initialization routine for Reference Classes. It seems that a field 'self' is treated as if it's name would be '.self' (which we know is reserved for the self reference of the instantiated object itself) and thus an error is thrown. If the field value is assigned in an explicit call after the

Sorry guys, but I chose a really stupid name before (no "reference classes"). Hope it's okay to re-post. Cheers, Janko >>> ORIGINAL MESSAGE <<< Dear list, Is it possible to update or reassign '.self' with an image of '.self' (e.g. a locally stored .Rda file) from within a method? I know that this might sound akward, but here's the use

Hi there, I''d like to choose between an "static" and "dynamic" access of a reference class field, say ''a''. myObj <- getRefClass("Blabla")$new() Static: myObj$a Dynamic: myObj$a.get() where the function retrieves the data from a database (or some other location), stores it to a buffer and

Dear list, I don't know what's the correct term for this in the OOP context, but is it possible to "clone"/copy an instance of a reference class (say 'a') so that I get an *autonomous* second instance 'b'? Autonomous in the sense that changes to 'a' do not affect 'b'. I know that this is somewhat against the pass-by-reference paradigm, but the

Dear list, I wonder how to write methods for the function 'as' in the sense that I can call 'as(object, Class, strict=TRUE, ext)' and let method dispatch figure out the correct method. AFAIU, there is a difference between, e.g. 'as.data.frame' and the methods of 'as()' as stated above since the former depends on arg 'x' instead of 'object',

Dear list, I came across a behavior that IMHO is somewhat undesired when calling '$field()': If the field name whose value you're trying to get is *not* a valid field of the Reference Class, then R doesn't stop there with an error, but scans through all enclosing environments/frames. The result is something similar to calling '|get(<objname>, inherits=TRUE)|'

Hi Gabriel, and thanks for answering. I'm basically just trying to find a way to use the power of `...` in more complex scenarios and I'm well aware that this might not be the best approach ;-) Regarding your actual question: "Are you suggesting methods be dispatched based on the *contents* of ... [...]?" Yes, I guess currently I kind of do - but not on the argument *names*

Dear List, I'm currently investigating if the argument dispatch mechanism based on `...` could somehow be "generalized" to scenarios that involve `r` recipients located across `c` calling stack layers *and* combined with the S4 method mechanism (for those interested see

> setRefClass("Foo", fields = list()) Error in setRefClass("Foo", fields = list()) : A list argument for fields must have nonempty names for all the fields In my opinion, the above should not fail. There are no fields. Thanks, Michael [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Dears, I have a question about copying reference objects using the initialize method. 1) If the latter has no arguments, there is no problem to copy an object. myClass = setRefClass("myClass", fields = list(value = "numeric") ) myClass$methods(initialize = function(...){ ? value <<- 1 ? callSuper(...) }) newObject = myClass$new() newObject$value = 2 copyObject =

Well, the benefit lies in the ability to pass along arguments via `...` to more than one recipient that use *identical argument names* and/or when these recipients are not necessarily located on the same calling stack layer. I'm *not* after a *general* change in the way arguments are dispatched/functions are called as I'm actually a big friend of keepings things quite explicit (thus

Dear list, In a function, I don't care if my input has class 'integer' or 'numeric', so I wanted to use 'inherits()' to control for that. However, this function tells me that an actual object of class 'integer' does not inherit from class 'numeric'. The class def of 'integer' does state 'numeric' as one of the superclasses. Isn't

This bug appears intermittently in R CMD check when reference classes have finalize methods. The problem is that garbage collection can be run after the methods package is no longer available. It affects (periodically) the Bioconductor AnnotationDbi package as well as packages that contain Rcpp classes. To reproduce: library(methods) a = setRefClass("A",