On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Gabor Grothendieck < ggrothendi...@gmail.com> wrote:
...The way this might appear in code is if someone wanted to calculate the > number of one hour intervals in 18 hours. One could write: > > t18 <- times("18:00:00") > t1 <- times("1:00:00") > as.numeric(t18) / as.numeric(t1) > > but since we all know that it uses internal representations unless it > indicates otherwise Um, yes, I suppose that was the attitude in the 60's and 70's, but I think we have moved on from there. cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_abstraction > a typical code snippet might shorten it to: > > as.numeric(t18 / t1) > > and all such code would break if one were to cause that to generate an > error. > (18/24 day)/(1/24 day) is the perfectly meaningful dimensionless number 18, so this code should not break with a correct implementation of '/'. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis). Alas, chron gives the nonsense result of 18 days. -s [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.