R Programming By Example

The first source of confusion – various object models

The way you work with object-oriented programming in R is different from what you may see in other languages, such as Python, Java, C++, and many others. For the most part, these languages have a single object model that all people use. In the case of R, note that we have been writing object models, in plural. That's because R is a very special language and it has various ways of implementing object-oriented systems. Specifically, R has the following object models as of this book's writing—S3, S4, Reference Classes, R6, and Base Types. In the upcoming sections, we will dig deeper into the S3, S4, and R6 models. Now, we will briefly touch on Reference Classes and Base Types.

Reference Classes ...