S3 Classes with format and print?

[krlmlr]

For instance:

dput(pretty_bytes(1000))
> structure(1000, class = "pretty_bytes")
print(pretty_bytes(1000))
> [1] "1 kB"

Would you support this kind of functionality? It might break compatibility, but then there are not many revdeps (yet) ;-)

[gaborcsardi]

Yeah, that would be a more R-ish way, I guess. Which also means somewhat more messy of course. :)
E.g. if you do

x <- structure(1337, class = "pretty_bytes")
paste("File size:", x)

then no formatting is used. If we also implement as.character.pretty_bytes, then even this works, but it probably just messes up something else.

But we can do it, anyway, and then we'll see how it works out. :)

[krlmlr]

How important is backward compatibility? We could start by providing

pretty <- function(x, units) {
  structure(x, class = "pretty", units = units)
}

and deprecating the pretty_... stuff, just to reintroduce it in version 2.0.0. Or we break everything right away ;-)

[gaborcsardi]

I would like to keep the current way as well. We can just add a pretty or maybe pretty_units class independently I think. The current way would be kept as it is, so nothing breaks. Yeah, no many revdeps on CRAN, but I do use it in a couple of packages, and I also like the current simple way.

[gaborcsardi]

We probably want to use vctrs for this now?

[krlmlr]

I think subclassing "vctrs_vctr" will help us a lot here.