Since no one else has "bit", I'll take a stab. I'm an experienced R person, but I've recently been teaching myself objective-c and I've been using singletons quite a bit (and mis-using them quite a bit!). Not a computer scientist at all. You've been warned.
I don't think there is a comparable concept in R. You do have a choice of S3 or S4 classes for your object orientation in R. S3 is very loose in that you can add to S3 objects readily and abuse them a lot. There really is no checking of them unless you implement it manually. S4 objects are much "tighter" and they are less readily modified and are self-checking (I know some will complain about this characterization but it's approximately correct). So perhaps you want an S4 object so it's less likely to get mangled, but I doubt there is a way to prevent users from copying it, which would be more along the lines of a singleton. You can google the archives for some great discussions of S3 vs S4 if that sounds interesting. Bryan *********** Bryan Hanson Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry DePauw University On Mar 16, 2012, at 7:47 AM, David Cassany wrote: > Hi all, > > I know it may not have much sense thinking about a Singleton Pattern in an > R application which doesn't use any OOP facilities, however I'm curious to > know if anybody faced the same issue. I've been googling but using > "singleton pattern" as a key word leads to typical OOP languages like Java > or C++ among others. > > So my problem is that I'd like to ensure some very big objects aren't > copied again and again in some other variables. In the worst case I'll > check all code by myself to ensure it but in this case the application > won't force programmers to take it in consideration which is what I am > really looking for. > > Any advice will be highly appreciated :P > > Thanks! > -- > *David Cassany Viladomat > Software Developer > Transmural Biote**ch S.L* > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
