Fine with me as long as eliminating the inconveniences associated with it can 
be put on the roadmap. The alias instability and the fact that the user has no 
way to know if s/he should do ?`foo,numeric-method` or 
?`foo,numeric,ANY-method` to find the method has been a long-standing problem.

H.

On 3/21/19 21:29, Michael Lawrence wrote:
If we started over, I'd try to avoid this sort of complexity, but "ANY" 
truncation has been happening since at least 2003.

> matchSignature(c("numeric", "ANY"), foo)
        x
"numeric"

So I'm not sure we want to mess with it.

Michael

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 8:14 PM Pages, Herve 
<hpa...@fredhutch.org<mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org>> wrote:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for looking into this. I suspect that truncation of ANY suffixes from 
method signatures is also the culprit behind the sudden breakage of aliases of 
the form \alias{foo,numeric-method} when a method without the ANY suffix in its 
signature gets added to the ecosystem. See my post about this to the Bioc-devel 
mailing list a couple of months ago: 
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioc-devel/2019-January/014603.html<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__stat.ethz.ch_pipermail_bioc-2Ddevel_2019-2DJanuary_014603.html&d=DwMFaQ&c=eRAMFD45gAfqt84VtBcfhQ&r=BK7q3XeAvimeWdGbWY_wJYbW0WYiZvSXAJJKaaPhzWA&m=kjmNpPtpGtaMCrw8ubpy0siyz1xl8WY9gONjtL65IxE&s=R9Hi4Rm4nk-izYC8vDCj0NiuFdUMG4vZVbdQgsvxkDM&e=>

So overall isn't this truncation more trouble than it's worth?

H.

On 3/19/19 10:12, Michael Lawrence wrote:
This is due to the intentional truncation of ANY suffixes from method 
signatures. I've hacked selectMethod() to be robust to that and will commit 
soon. Thanks for the report.

Michael

On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 9:32 AM Pages, Herve 
<hpa...@fredhutch.org<mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org>> wrote:
Here is an example:

  setGeneric("foo", function(x, y) standardGeneric("foo"))

  setMethod("foo", c("numeric", "ANY"),
    function(x, y) cat("I'm the foo#numeric#ANY method\n")
  )


Dispatch works as expected but selectMethod() fails to find the method:


  > foo(1, TRUE)
  I'm the foo#numeric#ANY method

  > selectMethod("foo", c("numeric", "logical"))
  Error in selectMethod("foo", c("numeric", "logical")) :
    no method found for signature numeric, logical

Adding an arbitrary method that doesn't have ANY in the signature "fixes" 
selectMethod():

  setMethod("foo", c("complex", "integer"),
    function(x, y) cat("I'm the foo#complex#integer method\n")
  )

Then:

  > selectMethod("foo", c("numeric", "logical"))
  Method Definition:

  function (x, y)
  cat("I'm the foo#numeric#ANY method\n")

  Signatures:
        x         y
  target  "numeric" "logical"
  defined "numeric" "ANY"


Thanks,

H.


--
Hervé Pagès

Program in Computational Biology
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514
P.O. Box 19024
Seattle, WA 98109-1024

E-mail: 
hpa...@fredhutch.org<mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org><mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org<mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org>>
Phone:  (206) 667-5791
Fax:    (206) 667-1319


        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org<mailto:R-devel@r-project.org> mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__stat.ethz.ch_mailman_listinfo_r-2Ddevel&d=DwMFaQ&c=eRAMFD45gAfqt84VtBcfhQ&r=BK7q3XeAvimeWdGbWY_wJYbW0WYiZvSXAJJKaaPhzWA&m=4e2MsIBoF9YnF3BCkiOk1m2kFgKBe24FwU28c-wuAyc&s=ydXNxAwEa5eG9lTu27sx-8KsT6gU66TbmJLcaYEaleg&e=>

--
Hervé Pagès

Program in Computational Biology
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514
P.O. Box 19024
Seattle, WA 98109-1024

E-mail: hpa...@fredhutch.org<mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org>
Phone:  (206) 667-5791
Fax:    (206) 667-1319


--
Hervé Pagès

Program in Computational Biology
Division of Public Health Sciences
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514
P.O. Box 19024
Seattle, WA 98109-1024

E-mail: hpa...@fredhutch.org<mailto:hpa...@fredhutch.org>
Phone:  (206) 667-5791
Fax:    (206) 667-1319


        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

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

Reply via email to