Revision history [back]

One possible way to transform the S4 slot selector @ into a generic function is to define a generic accessor function for each slot in the S4 object, using the following syntax:

get_my_slot <- function(x) {
  UseMethod("get_my_slot")
}

get_my_slot.my_class <- function(x) {
  slot(x, "my_slot")
}

In this example, my_slot is the name of the slot that we want to access. We define a generic function get_my_slot that dispatches on the class of the S4 object, and a method get_my_slot.my_class that extracts the value of my_slot using the slot function.

To use this generic function, we can call get_my_slot with the S4 object as the argument:

my_object <- new("my_class", my_slot = "my_value")
get_my_slot(my_object)
# Output: "my_value"

This approach allows us to define custom accessor functions for each slot in the S4 object, providing greater flexibility and modularity in our code.