If you change 'area' to an environment, you may be able to get something close to what you want.

For example:

setClass("Square",
         representation(
                        length='numeric',
                        width='numeric',
                        area='environment'
                        ),
         prototype(
                   length=0,
                   width=0,
                   area=new.env()
                   )
         )

setGeneric("area", function(x) standardGeneric("area"))
setMethod("area", "Square",
          function(x){
            if (length(ls(x...@area)) == 0){
              message("Computing")
              assign("area", x...@width * x...@length, envi...@area)
            }
            message("Accessing")
            get("area", envi...@area)
          })

tmp <- new("Square", length=5, width=10)
area(tmp) ## This should show "computing" and "accessing"
area(tmp) ## the 2nd call should show 'accessing' only


b



On Oct 14, 2009, at 3:31 PM, Steve Lianoglou wrote:

Hi,

I was wondering if there was a way to store the results of a
computationally expensive "getter" call on an S4 object, so that it is
only calculated once for each object.

Trivial example: let's say I want to cache the "expensive" area
calculation of a square object.

setClass("Square",
  representation(
    length='numeric',
    width='numeric',
    area='numeric'
  ),
  prototype(
    length=0,
    width=0,
    area=-1
  )
)

setGeneric("area", function(x) standardGeneric("area"))
setMethod("area", "Square",
function(x) {
  if (x...@area == -1) {
    x...@area <- x...@width * x...@height
  }
  x...@area
})

Now the first time I call ``area(my.square)`` it computes
``my.squ...@width * my.squ...@height``, but each subsequent call
returns `...@area`` since the area computation has already been calc'd
and set for this object.

Is this possible? I'm guessing the R pass by value semantics is going
to make this one difficult ... is there some S4 reference I missed
that has this type of info from?

Thanks,
-steve

--
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
  |  Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
  |  Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact

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