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OO field guide
This chapter is a field guide for recognising and working with R’s objects in the wild. R has three object oriented systems (plus the base types), so it can be a bit intimidating. The goal of this guide is not to make you an expert in all four systems, but to help you identify which system you’re working with and to help you use it effectively.
Central to any object-oriented system are the concepts of class and method. A class defines the behaviour of objects by describing their attributes and their relationship to other classes. The class is also used when selecting methods, functions that behave differently depending on the class of their input. Classes are usually organised in a hierarchy: if a method does not exist for a ...
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