Dear all, what is the proper way to make the assignment operator generic and define methods depending on the class of the assigned value?
Best regards Jens Oehlschlägel P.S. I vaguely remember that this was possible in S+. In R I tried to no avail: # using this like h<-1:3 gives Error: in `<-.default`(h, 1:3) : invalid (do_set) left-hand side to assignment "<-.default" <- get("<-") # using this does fail on subassignments like: h <- 1:3 ; h[1] <- 7 (h still is 1:3) "<-.default" <- function(x, value){ assign(deparse(substitute(x)), value, parent.frame()) invisible(x) } # this seems to work "<-" <- function(x, value){ UseMethod("<-", value) } # whenever the assigned value has class 'ff' I want to do execute something like "<-.ff" <- function(x, value){ y <- clone(value) assign(deparse(substitute(x)), y, parent.frame()) y } > version _ platform i386-pc-mingw32 arch i386 os mingw32 system i386, mingw32 status major 2 minor 6.0 year 2007 month 10 day 03 svn rev 43063 language R version.string R version 2.6.0 (2007-10-03) -- ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel