On 12-01-04 3:19 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urba...@r-project.org> wrote:
Paul,
On Jan 3, 2012, at 3:08 PM, Paul Johnson wrote:
I would like to ask for advice from R experts about the benefits or
dangers of using attr to return information with an object that is
returned from a function. I have a feeling as though I have cheated by
using attributes, and wonder if I've done something fishy.
Maybe I mean to ask, where is the dividing line between attributes and
instance variables? The separation is not clear in my mind anymore.
Background: I paste below a function that takes in a regression object
and make changes to the data and/or call and then run a
revised regression. In my earlier effort, I was building a return
list, including the new fitted regression object plus some
variables that have information about the changes that a were made.
That creates some inconvenience, however. When the regression is in a
list object, then methods for lm objects don't apply to that result
object. The return is not an lm anymore.
Why don't you just subclass it? That's the "normal" way of doing things - you
simply add additional entries for your subclass (e.g. m$myItem1, m$myItem2, ...), prepend
your new subclass name and you're done. You can still dispatch on your subclass before
the superclass while superclass methods just work as well..
Cheers,
Simon
Yes. I see that now.
But I'm still wondering about the attribute versus variable question.
To the programmer, is there any difference between returning
information as attributes or variables?
Does R care if I do this:
class(res)<- c("mcreg", "lm")
attr(res, "centeredVars")<- nc
Or this:
class(res)<- c("mcreg", "lm")
res$centeredVars<- nc
Is there some place "down there," in the C foundations of R, where an
attribute is just a variable, as is centeredVars?
Yes, the internal implementation is different (res$centeredVars implies
res is a list, but attributes are stored as a pairlist). But the thing
itself (your nc) can't tell where it is stored.
Attributes are slightly harder to work with, so Simon's recommendation
is good advice. But in cases where you want other functions to work
with the result, and the result isn't a named list with a class, then
attributes are a convenient way to go.
The only two snags I can think of are 1, that R uses a few attributes
for its own purposes (e.g. "names", "dim" and "dimnames") and if you use
those attribute names for something incompatible you'll probably run
into all sorts of problems and 2, that S4 objects use attributes
internally. I wouldn't recommend using attributes on an S4 object.
Duncan Murdoch
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