On Sat, 16 Jul 2005, Bernardo Rangel Tura wrote:
> At 10:11 12/7/2005, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> hi all
>>
>> why does R do this:
>>
>> (-8)^(1/3)=NaN
>>
>> the answer should be : -2
>
Yes and no.
The problem is that the reciprocal of 3 is not exactly representable as a
floating point number (it has an infinite binary expansion
.010101010101...)
So the R expression 1/3 actually returns a number slightly different from
one-third. It is a fraction with denominator a power of two (probably
2^53). Now, -8 to power that is a fraction with denominator a power of 2
is not a real number, so, NaN.
It would be nice if R could realize that you meant the cube root of -8,
but that requires either magical powers or complicated and unreliable
heuristics. The real solution might be a function like
root(x,a,b)
to compute x^(a/b), where a and b could then be exactly representable
integers. If someone wants to write one....
-thomas
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