On 01-Jun-05 Martin Maechler wrote:
> Testing the code that Morten Welinder suggested for improving
> extreme tail behavior of qcauchy(),
> I found what you can read in the subject.
> namely that the tan() + floating-point implementation on all
> four different versions of Redhat linux, I have access to on
> i686 and amd64 architectures,
>
> > 1/tan(c(-0,0))
> gives
> -Inf Inf
>
> and of course, that can well be considered a feature, since
> after all, the tan() function does jump from -Inf to +Inf at 0.
> I was still surprised that this even happens on the R level,
> and I wonder if this distinction of "-0" and "0" shouldn't be
> mentioned in some place(s) of the R documentation.
Indeed I would myself consider this a very useful feature!
However, a query: Clearly from the above (ahich I can reproduce
too), tan() can distinguish between -0 and +0, and return
different results (otherwise 1/tan() would not return different
results).
But how can the user tell the difference between +0 amnd -0?
I've tried the following:
> sign(c(-0,0))
[1] 0 0
> sign(tan(c(-0,0)))
[1] 0 0
> sign(1/tan(c(-0,0)))
[1] -1 1
so sign() is not going to tell us. Is there a function which can?
Short of wrting one's own:
sign0 <-
function(x){
if(abs(x)>0) stop("For this test x must be +0 or -0")
return(sign(1/tan(x)))
}
;)
Best wishes,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 01-Jun-05 Time: 10:50:06
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