On Sep 20, 2015, at 3:06 PM, Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengts...@ucsf.edu> wrote:
> Is there a missing value constant defined for R_xlen_t, cf. NA_INTEGER
> (== R_NaInt == INT_MIN) for int(eger)? If not, is it correct to
> assume that missing values should be taken care/tested for before
> coercing from int or double?
>
R_xlen_t is type of the vector length (see XLENGTH()) and as such never holds a
missing value (since there is no such thing as a missing length). It is *not* a
native type for R vectors and therefore there is no official representation of
NAs in R_xlen_t.
Although native R vectors can be used as indices, the way it typically works is
that the code first checks for NAs in the R vector and only then converts to
R_xlen_t, so the NA value is never stored in R_xlen_t even for indexing.
--- cut here, content below is less relevant ---
That said, when converting packages from "legacy" .Call code before long vector
support which used asInteger() to convert an index I tend to use this utility
for convenience:
static R_INLINE R_xlen_t asLength(SEXP x, R_xlen_t NA) {
double d;
if (TYPEOF(x) == INTSXP && LENGTH(x) > 0) {
int res = INTEGER(x)[0];
return (res == NA_INTEGER) ? NA : ((R_xlen_t) res);
}
d = asReal(x);
return (R_finite(d)) ? ((R_xlen_t) d) : NA;
}
Note that this explicitly allows the caller to specify NA representation since
it depends on the use - often it's simply 0, other times -1 will do since
typically anything negative is equally bad. As noted above, this is not what R
itself does, so it's more of a convenience to simplify conversion of legacy
code.
Cheers,
Simon
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