Classes and Objects are basic concepts of Object-Oriented Programming that revolve
around the real-life entities. Everything in R is an object. An object is simply a data
structure that has some methods and attributes. A class is just a blueprint or a sketch
of these objects. It represents the set of properties or methods that are common to all
objects of one type.
Unlike most other programming languages, R has a three-class system. These are S3,
S4, and Reference Classes.
S3 Class
S3 is the simplest yet the most popular OOP system and it lacks formal definition and
structure. An object of this type can be created by just adding an attribute to it.
Following is an example to make things more clear:
Example:
# create a list with required components
movieList <- list(name = "Iron man", leadActor = "Robert Downey Jr")
# give a name to your class
class(movieList) <- "movie"
movieList
Output:
$name
[1] "Iron man"
$leadActor
[1] "Robert Downey Jr"
In S3 systems, methods don’t belong to the class. They belong to generic functions. It
means that we can’t create our own methods here, as we do in other programming
languages like C++ or Java. But we can define what a generic method (for example
print) does when applied to our objects.
print(movieList)
Output:
$name
[1] "Iron man"
$leadActor
[1] "Robert Downey Jr"
Example: Creating a user-defined print function
# now let us write our method
print.movie <- function(obj)
cat("The name of the movie is", obj$name,".\n")
cat(obj$leadActor, "is the lead actor.\n")
Output:
The name of the movie is Iron man .
Robert Downey Jr is the lead actor.
S4 Class
Programmers of other languages like C++, Java might find S3 to be very much
different than their normal idea of classes as it lacks the structure that classes are
supposed to provide. S4 is a slight improvement over S3 as its objects have a proper
definition and it gives a proper structure to its objects.
Example:
library(methods)
# definition of S4 class
setClass("movies", slots=list(name="character", leadActor =
"character"))
# creating an object using new() by passing class name and slot
values
movieList <- new("movies", name="Iron man", leadActor = "Robert
Downey Jr")
movieList
Output:
An object of class "movies"
Slot "name":
[1] "Iron man"
Slot "leadActor":
[1] "Robert Downey Jr"
As shown in the above example, setClass() is used to define a class and new() is
used to create the objects.
The concept of methods in S4 is similar to S3, i.e., they belong to generic functions.
The following example shows how to create a method:
movieList
Output:
An object of class "movies"
Slot "name":
[1] "Iron man"
Slot "leadActor":
[1] "Robert Downey Jr"
Example:
# using setMethod to set a method
setMethod("show", "movies",
function(object)
cat("The name of the movie is ", object@name, ".\n")
cat(object@leadActor, "is the lead actor.\n")
movieList
Output:
[1] "show"
The name of the movie is Iron man .
Robert Downey Jr is the lead actor.
Reference Class
Reference Class is an improvement over S4 Class. Here the methods belong to the
classes. These are much similar to object-oriented classes of other languages.
Defining a Reference class is similar to defining S4 classes. We
use setRefClass() instead of setClass() and “fields” instead of “slots”.
Example:
library(methods)
# setRefClass returns a generator
movies <- setRefClass("movies", fields = list(name = "character",
leadActor = "character", rating = "numeric"))
#now we can use the generator to create objects
movieList <- movies(name = "Iron Man",
leadActor = "Robert downey Jr", rating = 7)
movieList
Output:
Reference class object of class "movies"
Field "name":
[1] "Iron Man"
Field "leadActor":
[1] "Robert downey Jr"
Field "rating":
[1] 7
Now let us see how to add some methods to our class with an example.
Example
library(methods)
movies <- setRefClass("movies", fields = list(name = "character",
leadActor = "character", rating = "numeric"),
methods = list(
increment_rating = function()
rating <<- rating + 1
},
decrement_rating = function()
rating <<- rating - 1
))
movieList <- movies(name = "Iron Man",
leadActor = "Robert downey Jr", rating = 7)
# print the value of rating
movieList$rating
# increment and then print the rating
movieList$increment_rating()
movieList$rating
# decrement and print the rating
movieList$decrement_rating()
movieList$rating
Output:
[1] 7
[1] 8
[1] 7
