[Rd] Changes to methods package in R 1.4

[John Chambers]

A few recent changes:

- as announced to R-core, the package now has a version of the plot
function with formal arguments (x, y, ...) that allow methods to be
defined for x and/or y.  ?setMethod has some examples.

- The "basic classes" have been made somewhat more complete (class
"structure" was added, along with relations among it, "matrix", "array",
"ts", and "vector").  Closer to the green book and conventional S
relations.
  For 1.4, this doesn't quite go as far as having formal slots for
"matrix", etc.  Formal slots for these classes should work, but there
may be some touchy points in back-compatibility, particularly with the
"optional" dimnames slot for arrays, so the plan is to leave that for
the next version.

- A number of checks for duplicate slots and other problems have been
added.  Situations were being let through that could cause bad problems
later (e.g., slots with different classes in inherited duplicates).  An
example was added to ?setClass illustrating what's caught by some of the
checks.

John
-- 
John M. Chambers                  jmc@bell-labs.com
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies    office: (908)582-2681
700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2C-282  fax:    (908)582-3340
Murray Hill, NJ  07974            web: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~jmc
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