[R] S4 vs S3. New Package

[Simon Zehnder]

This depends very often of on the developer and what he is comfortable with. I like S4 classes, as I come from C++ and S4 classes approximate C++ classes at least more than S3 classes do (Reference Classes would do so even more and I know very good R programmers liking these most).

1) I wrote a package for MCMC simulation with S4 classes carrying all simulated values - fast enough for me: in less than 1.5 secs I have my sample of 100.000 values together with several other 100T values like log-likelihoods, posterior hyper parameters, etc. I watch out for not copying too often an object but sometimes it is not avoidable. 

2) That is not true: 
    
Books:
http://www.amazon.de/Software-Data-Analysis-Programming-Statistics/dp/0387759352/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384014486&sr=8-1&keywords=John+chambers+data
http://www.amazon.de/Programming-Data-Language-John-Chambers/dp/0387985034/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1384014486&sr=8-4&keywords=John+chambers+data

Online:
https://www.rmetrics.org/files/Meielisalp2009/Presentations/Chalabi1.pdf
https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/S-Workshop/Gentleman/S4Objects.pdf

And for a bunch of packages look into the Bioconductor packages.

Best

Simon

On 09 Nov 2013, at 16:22, daniel schnaider <dschnaider at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am working on a new credit portfolio optimization package. My question is
> if it is more recommended to develop in S4 object oriented or S3.
> 
> It would be more naturally to develop in object oriented paradigm, but
> there is many concerns regarding S4.
> 
> 1) Performance of S4 could be an issue as a setter function, actually
> changes the whole object behind the scenes.
> 
> 2) Documentation. It has been really hard to find examples in S4. Most
> books and articles consider straightforward S3 examples.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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