foundation of array-like containers in Bioconductor

 The S4Arrays package defines the Array virtual class to be
 extended by other S4 classes that wish to implement a container
 with an array-like semantic. It also provides: (1) low-level
 functionality meant to help the developer of such container to
 implement basic operations like display, subsetting, or coercion
 of their array-like objects to an ordinary matrix or array, and
 (2) a framework that facilitates block processing of array-like
 objects (typically on-disk objects).