Mutable objects in strongRstrong - Had.pdfVIP

Mutable objects in R Hadley Wickham December 15, 2010 Abstract Programming paradigms help us understand the differences and similarities between fundamental choices in language design. This paper looks at R in the context of three paradigms of object oriented program- ming: mutable vs. immutable objects, generic-function vs message-passing methods, and class-based vs. prototype-based inheritance. The paper also describes a new OO package for R, mutatr, which provides mutable objects with message- passing methods and prototype-based inheritance. The mutatr package is available on CRAN. 1 Introduction A programming paradigm is a fundamental style of computing programming, like object-oriented, functional, declarative, procedural and logical. Knowing what paradigms a language supports allows us to quickly get a feel for the attributes of that language. This paper explores some lower level paradigms of object oriented (OO) design. This will help us understand some of consequences of design decisions made when R was written, and will identify areas of interest for future exploration. The paper is broken down as follows. Section 2 discusses the programming paradigms that impact the design of an object system. I compare and contrast mutable vs. immutable objects, message-passing vs. generic-function methods, and class-based vs. prototype-based inheritance. Section 3 introduces a new OO package for R, , available from CRAN. It provides mutable objects with message-passing methods and prototype-based inheritance. Three case studies that these features shown in Section 4 and Section 5 wraps up the paper with general conclusions and suggestions for future directions. 2 Pa