[R] Summary method needed?

[Heinz Tuechler]

At 21:04 02.08.2006 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Christian Hennig wrote:
>
>> Thank you Brian!
>> 
>> > > I'm updating my fpc package at the moment and will add some new
functions.
>> > > I learned that there should be print and summary methods for the key
>> > > functions.
>> >
>> > for 'classes', I think.
>> 
>> Yes.
>> 
>> > > But in some cases the print method will make use of more or less all
the
>> > > output information of the function. Is there any reason to implement a
>> > > summary method in these cases?
>> >
>> > Would a more concise print() method be useful?  If so the existing
print()
>> > could become summary().
>> 
>> :-)
>> What I initially did some years ago was to write summary methods to
print out
>> the required informations. Then M. Maechler told me that this is not the
>> purpose of a summary method and I should write a print.summary method for
>> this. Now I realise that I actually just want to print, and I don't really
>> need the extra "synopsis" to be done by summary().
>> 
>> Now is there any recommendation on this? My intuition would be to write a
>> print, but not a summary method.
>
>That sounds fine for your purposes.
>

Maybe I am wrong, but as far as I see, print() has the disadvantage that it
has to return x and must not return the summarized results as an object.
You remember the difficulties with print.survfit.
Instead it seems to be allowed that summary does not only print but also
return summarized results.
Is that right?

Greetings,
Heinz

>-- 
>Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
>Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
>University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
>1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
>Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
>
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