ABSTRACT
In chapter 12 we will learn about base types.
To talk about objects and OOP in R we first need to clear up a fundamental confusion about two uses of the word “object”. So far in this book, we’ve used the word in the general sense captured by John Chambers’ pithy quote: “Everything that exists in R is an object”. However, while everything is an object, not everything is object-oriented. This confusion arises because the base objects come from S, and were developed before anyone thought that S might need an OOP system. The tools and nomenclature evolved organically over many years without a single guiding principle.
Most of the time, the distinction between objects and object-oriented objects is not important. But here we need to get into the nitty gritty details so we’ll use the terms base objects and OO objects to distinguish them.
“Base versus OO objects” shows you how to identify base and OO objects.
“Base types” gives a complete set of the base types used to build all objects.
