| methods-package {methods} | R Documentation |
Formally defined methods and classes for R objects, plus other programming tools, as described in the references.
This package provides the “S4” or “S version 4” approach to methods and classes in a functional language.
For a complete
list of functions and classes, use library(help="methods").
R Development Core Team
Maintainer: R Core Team R-core@r-project.org
The R package methods implements, with a few exceptions, the programming interface for classes and methods in the book Programming with Data (John M. Chambers, Springer, 1998), in particular sections 1.6, 2.7, 2.8, and chapters 7 and 8.
While the programming interface for the methods package follows the
reference, the R software is an original implementation, so details in
the reference that reflect the S4 implementation may appear
differently in R. Also, there are extensions to the programming
interface developed more recently than the reference. For a
discussion of details see ?Methods
and the links from that documentation.