On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 13:07 -0600, Erin Hodgess wrote: > Dear R People: > > Could someone direct me to some documentation on the > difference between S3 and S4 classes, please? > > For example, why would a person use one as opposed to another? > Maybe pros and cons of each? > > Thanks in advance! > > R Version 2.2.0 (I'm downloading the new one this afternoon!) Windows. > > Happy New Year!
Some places to start: 1. Fritz Leisch's "S4 Classes and Methods" from the useR! 2004 meeting: http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/Conferences/useR-2004/Keynotes/Leisch.pdf 2. Doug Bates' "Converting Packages to S4" in R News 3/1, 2003: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2003-1.pdf 3. Thomas Lumley's "Programmer's Niche: A Simple Class, in S3 and S4" in R News 4/1, 2004: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2004-1.pdf Also, if you do a Google search with the following: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:stat.ethz.ch+s3+s4 that will bring up some discussions (248 hits) in the list archives, mainly in r-devel, some of which will be relevant to your question. In addition, you might want to look at: 1. John M. Chambers. Programming with Data. Springer, New York, 1998. ISBN 0-387-98503-4. AKA "The Green Book" 2. William N. Venables and Brian D. Ripley. S Programming. Springer, 2000. ISBN 0-387-98966-8. HTH, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
