On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Robin Hankin wrote: > [I'm not sure if this is "intelligible to non-programmers" or not]
Not, I suspect: R-exts is not intended to be. > R-exts (section 4.2) gives an example of the .C() function whose > third argument is > > "as.integer(length(a))", > > and urges the user to coerce all the arguments to the correct form > (on pain of "hard-to-catch errors" > which I now know to be very appropriate, if understated, phrasing). > > The length() function returns an integer, according to the helppage. > > So, why does the argument above use as.integer()? Because things written on help pages can change. There *is* a potential issue here, as 64-bit platforms could support longer vectors than an R integer can represent. I suspect before too long we will need a `size' type for lengths. Already object.size() has been changed to return a double, not an integer, since people are created objects of more than 2Gb in size. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
