Rich Calaway pointed out that S4 came out c. 1996-97, not 1991. Bill Dunlap TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com
On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 8:30 PM, William Dunlap <wdun...@tibco.com> wrote: > > the lack of a decimal place had historically not been significant > > Version 4 of S (c. 1991) and versions of S+ based on it treated a sequence > of digits without a decimal point as integer. > > Bill Dunlap > TIBCO Software > wdunlap tibco.com > > On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 4:33 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> On 25/08/2018 4:49 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote: >> >>> The choice of the L suffix in R to mean "R integer type", which >>> is mapped to the "int" type at the C level, and NOT to the "long int" >>> type, is really unfortunate as it seems to be misleading and confusing >>> a lot of people. >>> >> >> Can you provide any evidence of that (e.g. a link to a message from one >> of these people)? I think a lot of people don't really know about the L >> suffix, but that's different from being confused or misleaded by it. >> >> And if you make a criticism like that, it would really be fair to suggest >> what R should have done instead. I can't think of anything better, given >> that "i" was already taken, and that the lack of a decimal place had >> historically not been significant. Using "I" *would* have been confusing >> (3i versus 3I being very different). Deciding that 3 suddenly became an >> integer value different from 3. would have led to lots of inefficient >> conversions (since stats mainly deals with floating point values). >> >> Duncan Murdoch >> >> >> >>> The fact that nowadays "int" and "long int" have the same size on most >>> platforms is only anecdotal here. >>> >>> Just my 2 cents. >>> >>> H. >>> >>> On 08/25/2018 10:01 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> On 25 August 2018 at 09:28, Carl Boettiger wrote: >>>> | I always thought it meant "Long" (I'm assuming R's integers are long >>>> | integers in C sense (iirrc one can declare 'long x', and it being >>>> common to >>>> | refer to integers as "longs" in the same way we use "doubles" to mean >>>> | double precision floating point). But pure speculation on my part, >>>> so I'm >>>> | curious! >>>> >>>> It does per my copy (dated 1990 !!) of the 2nd ed of Kernighan & >>>> Ritchie. It >>>> explicitly mentions (sec 2.2) that 'int' may be 16 or 32 bits, and >>>> 'long' is >>>> 32 bit; and (in sec 2.3) introduces the I, U, and L labels for >>>> constants. So >>>> "back then when" 32 bit was indeed long. And as R uses 32 bit integers >>>> ... >>>> >>>> (It is all murky because the size is an implementation detail and later >>>> "essentially everybody" moved to 32 bit integers and 64 bit longs as >>>> the 64 >>>> bit architectures became prevalent. Which is why when it matters one >>>> should >>>> really use more explicit types like int32_t or int64_t.) >>>> >>>> Dirk >>>> >>>> >>> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >> > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
