Dear Christophe

type

showMethods("foo1", inc=TRUE)
showMethods("foo2", inc=TRUE)

to see the difference between the two functions, and this will explain their different behaviour. This feature of S4 has been discussed here many times before, see e.g.: http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e4/help/08/01/1676.html

Perhaps juggling with the 'n' argument of 'parent.frame' could help in hacking something together that 'works', but as far as I can see what you want to is an abuse of R's pass by value / functional language semantics.

For example, try these and check whether this results in what you intended:

foo2(3)
foo2(e+2)
sapply(1:5, foo2)
ls()

        Best wishes
        Wolfgang


Christophe Genolini scripsit 15/03/10 11:33:
Hi the list,
I define a method that want to change an object without assignation (foo(x) and not x<-foo(x)) using deparse and assign. But when the argument of the method does not match *exactly* with the definition of the generic function, assign does not work...
Anything wrong?

Christophe

#------ Does not work ------#
setGeneric("foo1",function(x,...){standardGeneric("foo1")})

setMethod(f="foo1",signature="numeric",definition=
   function(x,y=1,...){
       nameX<-deparse(substitute(x))
       x <- x^2
       assign(nameX,x,envir=parent.frame())
   }
)

e <- 3
foo1(e,y=5)
cat(e)


#------ Does work ------#
setGeneric("foo2",function(x,...){standardGeneric("foo2")})

setMethod(f="foo2",signature="numeric",definition=
   function(x,...){
       nameX<-deparse(substitute(x))
       x <- x^2
       assign(nameX,x,envir=parent.frame())
   }
)

e <- 3
foo2(e,y=5)
cat(e)

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--
Wolfgang Huber
EMBL
http://www.embl.de/research/units/genome_biology/huber/contact

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