Proto is an R package that facilitates prototype programming, a type of object-oriented programming that does not use classes as an atomic concept (but is powerful enough to encompass them). The package is lightweight providing a thin layer on top of R environments. Unlike other packages which grow over time proto has become smaller over time as it was successively polished to reduce it to its essentials. Despite its small size prototype-based systems can be more powerful than more complex class-based systems. WWW: https://github.com/hadley/proto