Classes Corresponding to Basic Structures

Description

The virtual class structure and classes that extend it are formal classes analogous to S language structures such as arrays and time-series

Usage

## The folowing class names can appear in method signatures,
## as the class in as() and is() expressions, and, except for
## the classes commented as VIRTUAL, in calls to new()

"matrix"
"array"
"ts"

"structure" ## VIRTUAL

Objects from the Classes

Objects can be created by calls of the form new(Class, ...), where Class is the quoted name of the specific class (e.g., "matrix"), and the other arguments, if any, are interpreted as arguments to the corresponding function, e.g., to function matrix(). There is no particular advantage over calling those functions directly, unless you are writing software designed to work for multiple classes, perhaps with the class name and the arguments passed in.

Extends

The specific classes all extend class "structure", directly, and class "vector", by class "structure".

Methods

coerce

Methods are defined to coerce arbitrary objects to these classes, by calling the corresponding basic function, for example, as(x, "matrix") calls as.matrix(x).