Creating simple S3 objects to simplify code

Creating your own objects can do a great deal to simplify your code and workflows, making them easier for you to reproduce and reuse and abstracting away a lot of the internal logic of a program so that the cognitive load on you as a programmer is reduced and you can concentrate more on the bioinformatic and analytical aspects of the project you're working on. R actually has numerous ways of creating objects and classes. In this recipe, we'll look at its simplest, most ad hoc method—S3. This is a pretty informal way of creating objects and classes but does suffice in a lot of cases.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we'll need just base R functions, so there&apos...