[R] Fwd: generic methods - in particular the summary function

[David Winsemius]

On Sep 27, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Christophe Dutang wrote:

> Nobody wants to answer my question... is there something stupid in it?

I couldn't really say. Not being a user of fitdistrplus I don't have  
much baseline experience. Had you posted code that produced something  
to work on,  I might have made an effort at applying the methods I  
typically use, such as str(<object>), methods(<function>), and  
printing out the function code. But I am a rather low-level R-user,  
and as soon as you strart throwing around questions about NAMESPACE,  
my eyes glaze over and I move to the next question.

When I do install and load fitdistrplus and then execute:

methods(summary)

.. I see a new function which is not even invisible, called  
summary.fitdist. So it seems to be in my NAMESPACE   ... or at least  
what I dimly understand about such metaphysical entities. I get an  
error when I execute your suggestion:

 > S3method(summary, fitdist)
Error: could not find function "S3method"

So I would have assumed that you had a package with that "S3method"  
function about which you had not informed us. Not sure this helps  
because, as I said, your question appeared more complex that I  
considered myself competent to answer.

-- 
David

>
> Début du message réexpédié :
>
>> De : Christophe Dutang <dutangc at gmail.com>
>> Date : 19 septembre 2009 11:26:51 HAEC
>> À : r-help at r-project.org
>> Objet : generic methods - in particular the summary function
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm currently working on the fitdistrplus package (that basically
>> fit distributions). There is something I do not understand about the
>> generic function summary.
>>
>> In the current version on CRAN, there is no NAMESPACE saying
>>
>> S3method(summary, fitdist)
>>
>> .
>> However if we use summary on an object send by fitdist function it
>> works fine...
>>
>> According to R-lang, we have
>> "
>> The most common use of generic functions is to provide print and
>> summary methods for
>> statistical ob jects, generally the output of some model fitting
>> process. To do this, each model
>> attaches a class attribute to its output and then provides a special
>> method that takes that output
>> and provides a nice readable version of it. The user then needs only
>> remember that print or
>> summary will provide nice output for the results of any analysis.
>> "
>>
>> I would like to be sure, that if the summary.fitdist is not exported
>> in the NAMESPACE, then we must use declare it with S3method.
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>>
>> Christophe
>>
>> --
>> Christophe Dutang
>> Ph.D. student at ISFA, Lyon, France
>> website: http://dutangc.free.fr
>>
>
> --
> Christophe Dutang
> Ph.D. student at ISFA, Lyon, France
> website: http://dutangc.free.fr
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT