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R5

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hadley edited this page Nov 6, 2010 · 12 revisions

The R5 object system

R has three object oriented (OO) systems: S3, S4 and R5. This page describes R5, the newest reference based .

R5, or reference classes, are brand new in R 2.12. They fill a long standing need for mutable objects that had previously been filled by non-core packages like R.oo, proto and mutatr.

There are two main differences between R5 and S3/S4:

  • R5 objects use message-passing OO
  • R5 objects are mutable: the usual R copy on modify semantics do not apply

Surprisingly, the implementation of R5 is almost entirely in R code - they are a combination of S4 methods and environments.

setRefClass(Class, fields)

Inheritance: setRefClass(Class, contains )

Adding new methods after creation: obj$methods Adding new fields after creation: obj$fields

Note: collation Note: namespaces and exporting Note: documentation

Note: using reference based classes: want to minimise side effects. Encapsulate. Majority of functions should still be side effect free.

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