
Chapter 3
Object-Oriented Programming in R
3.1 Introduction
Object-oriented programming (OOP) has become a widely used and valu-
able tool for software engineering. Much of its value derives from the fact
that it is often easier to design, write and maintain software when there is
some clear separation of the data representation from the operations that are
to be performed on it. In an OOP system, real physical things (like airline
passengers or the data from a microarray experiment) are generally repre-
sented by classes, and metho ds (functions) are written to handle the different
manipulations that need to be performed on the objects.
The views that ...