On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Renaud Gaujoux <ren...@mancala.cbio.uct.ac.za> wrote: > I do not want to access the slot itself but its content: a:toto would be > a...@slot1[['toto']]. > The thing is that I would like to have two different methods: '$' (that I > already have) and another one to define, ideally that behaves like '$'. > So in brief: > - a:toto would be for a...@slot1[['toto']] > - a$tata would be for a...@slot2[['tata']] > > But apparently it might not be possible. >
Even if possible, definitely not desirable. As already mentioned, a:b is the sequence a to b (as in 0:10), so it's going to look weird to anyone who hasn't noticed your definition. Also, it looks fairly meaningless. By which I mean there's no obvious reason why a colon should do what you want it to do. There's also no obvious reason why a dollar sign does what it does (whats it got to do with dollars?) but we've had it for 20 years so we're stuck with it. Write a method for your objects and force your users to do a bit more typing as a trade-off for legibility: slot1(a,"toto") is a lot more readable than a:toto (assuming you replace 'slot1' with something meaningful). Remember, code is most likely to be written once, and read many times - so make it easy for readers! Barry ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
