[Rd] Improving string concatenation

[Michael Lawrence]

Just to clarify, primitive (C-level) generics do not support dispatch
on basic classes (like character). This is for performance (no need to
consider dispatch on non-objects) and for sanity (in general,
redefining fundamental behaviors is dangerous). It is of course
possible to define a "+" method with a signature containing a class
not in the set of basic classes.

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 7:30 PM, Joshua Bradley <jgbradley1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the poster's on the SO post I linked to previously suggested this
> but if '+' were made to be S4 compliant, then adding the ability to concat
> strings with '+' would be a relatively simple addition (no pun intended) to
> the code base I believe. With a lot of other languages supporting this kind
> of concatenation, this is what surprised me most when first learning R.
>
> This is where my (lack of) experience in R starts to show and why I brought
> up the question about performance. I'm wondering how bad performance would
> be effected by making '+' (or all arithmetic operators in general) S4
> compliant.
>
> Josh Bradley
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 8:24 PM, Hervé Pagès <hpages at fredhutch.org> wrote:
>> [...]
>> >
>> > If I was to override `+` to concatenate strings, I would make it stick
>> > to the recycling scheme used by arithmetic and comparison operators
>> > (which is the most sensible of all IMO).
>>
>> Yeah, I agree, paste's recycling rules are sometimes painful. This
>> could be "fixed" with a nice new '+' concatenation operator, too. :)
>>
>> Gabor
>>
>> > H.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>
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