Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the explanation. What do you mean by "It doesn't support any sort of type hierarchy"? I've contributed to a package that defines some S4 methods on a base class and relies on that implementation being called on derived classes as well.
This may be a misunderstanding on my part because I am by no means an R expert (I've done a fair amount of stats work in R, but no library development). Can you add a method for base class "Foo" which will automatically apply to "Bar" which is a subtype of "Foo"?
As far as I know, yes, this works just fine. We rely on this in the BiocParallel package in Bioconductor.
