Probably the most basic question on S4 classes imaginable here.

What is the simplest way to save an S4 class you have defined so that you can reuse it elsewhere. I have a project where I'm taking a number of very large datasets and compiling summary information from them into small S4 objects. Since I'll therefore be switching R sessions to create the summary object for each dataset, it'd be good to be able to load in the definition of the class from a saved object (or have it load automatically) rather than having to include the long definition of the object at the top of each script (which I assume is bad practice anyway because the code defining the object might become inconsistent).

So what's the syntax along the lines of saveclass("myClass"), loadclass("myclass") or am I just thinking about this in the wrong way?

setClass("track", representation(x="numeric", y="numeric"))
x <- new("track", x=1:4, y=5:8)

save as binary

fn <- tempfile()
save(x, ascii=FALSE, file=fn)
rm(x)
load(fn)
x

save as ASCII

save(x, ascii=TRUE, file=fn)

ASCII text representation from which to regenerate the data

dput(x, file=fn)
y <- dget(fn) 

The original source can be found here.