There seems to be some unanticipated things happening with showMethods (as far 
as I can see, it is caused by getGenerics), for packages that have namespaces 
and has unexported methods.

Example:
library(Matrix)
showMethods(class = "dsyMatrix")

output (with a fair amount removed):

Function "isDiagonal":
 <not a generic function>

Function "isTriangular":
 <not a generic function>

These two functions are S4 methods which are not exported by Matrix.  None of 
them seems to have a direct method for "dsyMatrix".  Further experimentation 
(that I cannot recreate with the Recommended packages alone) show that even 
methods defined (and not exported) in packages that are imported by some other 
package will show up in the output above.

I would not expect this particular output, I would expect that the two 
functions above do not show up.  It is unclear to me what I would have expected 
if (say) isDiagonal actually had a method for dsyMatrix but it was not exported 
(I would however _prefer_ to be able to see this).

This has some impact for how I (want to) use showMethods to explore 
functionality in new packages, especially packages that has a huge list of 
dependencies.  

Kasper
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

Reply via email to