> > As Gabe mentioned (and you've explained about) the term "type" > > is really confusing here. As you know, the R internals are all > > about SEXPs, TYPEOF(), etc, and that's what the R level > > typeof(.) also returns. As you want to use something slightly > > different, it should be different naming, ideally something not > > existing yet in the R / S world, maybe 'kind' ? > > Agreed - I've been using type in the sense of "type system" > (particularly as it related to algebraic data types), but that's not > obvious from the current presentation, and as you note, is confusing > with existing notions of type in R. I like your suggestion of kind, > but I think it might be possible to just talk about classes, and > instead emphasise that while the components of the system are classes > (and indeed it's implemented using S3), the coercion/casting > relationship do not strictly follow the subclass/superclass > relationships.
I've taken another pass through (the first part of) the readme (https://github.com/r-lib/vctrs#vctrs), and I'm now confident that I can avoid using "type" by itself, and instead always use it in a compound phrase (like type system) to avoid confusion. That leaves the `.type` argument to many vctrs functions. I'm considering change it to .prototype, because what you actually give it is a zero-length vector of the class you want, i.e. a prototype of the desired output. What do you think of prototype as a name? Do you have any thoughts on good names for distinction vectors without a class (i.e. logical, integer, double, ...) from vectors with a class (e.g. factors, dates, etc). I've been thinking bare vector and S3 vector (leaving room to later think about S4 vectors). Do those sound reasonable to you? Hadley -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel