[R] problems with assigning a class to an environment

[Jens Oehlschlägel]

I was surprised to find that calling str() on an environment can remove
attributes from it, as in

> a <- new.env()
> class(a) <- "jens"
> class(a)
[1] "jens"
> str(a)
Class 'jens' length 0 <environment>
> class(a)
NULL

then I found in the R-Language-Manual in chapter 2.1.10 Environments the
sentence: 

	"In particular, assigning attributes to an environment can lead to
surprises"

Can please someone familiar with the internals explain what's going on?

Is it save, to assign a class to a list which contains an environment?


Thank you


Jens Oehlschlägel


> version
         _              
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     i386           
os       Win32          
system   i386, mingw32  
status                  
major    1              
minor    5.1            
year     2002           
month    06             
day      17             
language R 

-- 



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