Vitalie S. wrote:
Dear All,
A small inconsistency (it's probably not even a buglet):
setClass("A", contains="numeric")
[1] "A"
names(new("A", c(a=23)))
[1] "a"
setClass("B", contains="A")
[1] "B"
names(new("B", c(a=23)))
NULL
This is exactly that kind of behavior S4 was invented for, you expect
names to be there, but they are not :(.
You may expect them but you should not: the "names" attribute is not a
slot of class "numeric".
If you want names to be explicitly required, you have to say so:
> setClass("A", contains = "numeric", representation(names = "character"))
[1] "A"
> names(new("A", c(a=23)))
[1] "a"
> setClass("B", contains="A")
[1] "B"
> names(new("B", c(a=23)))
[1] "a"
Having said all that, the treatment of "names" is very special and
buried deep down in the implementation. While simple treatment of names
as a slot should work in most cases, it's unlikely that behavior will be
100% as expected.
Also, the reason you sometimes got names without specifying them as a
slot is that the low-level code that assigns names (or other attributes)
does not check that the S4 class definition has a corresponding slot.
So the names in the non-S4 vector used as the data part are left in
place, rather than say producing a warning or error.
If that behavior is left to be, one would have to implement @names
manually for children of basic pseudo-classes, which is quite an
overhead given the functionality is already in base R.
Thanks,
Vitalie.
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