On Thu, 5 Jul 2007, Giuseppe PEDRAZZI wrote: > I am using R 2.5.0, windows XP - italian language. > > I was perfoming some calculation on fractional exponential and > I found a strange behaviour. I do not know if it is really a bug, but I would > expect > a different answer from R. > > I was trying the following : > > x <- seq(-3,3, by =0.1) > n <- 2.2 > y <- exp(-x^n) > > well, the y vector contains (NaN for all negative value of x)
Yes. Non-integer powers of negative numbers are undefined (unless you use complex numbers). > but if you ask for single value calculation like > > y <- exp(-(-3)^2.2) or > > y <- exp(-(-2.9)^2.2) > > the answer is correct. I get NaN for both of these. Perhaps you mean exp(-2.9^2.2)? This gives a valid answer, but that is because it is exp(-(2.9^2.2)) not exp((-2.9)^2.2) > It seem it does not make the calculation in vector form. > > I got the same behaviour (NaN) in a for loop > >> for(i in 1:length(x)) y[i]=exp(x[i]^n) >> y > [1] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN > NaN NaN NaN NaN > [10] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN > NaN NaN NaN NaN > [19] NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN > NaN NaN NaN NaN > [28] NaN NaN NaN 1.000000 1.006330 > 1.029416 1.073302 1.142488 1.243137 > [37] 1.384082 1.578166 1.844237 2.210260 2.718282 > 3.432491 4.452553 5.936068 8.137120 > [46] 11.473746 16.648415 24.867680 38.251295 60.611092 > 98.967689 166.572985 289.077778 517.425935 > [55] 955.487320 1820.793570 3581.521323 7273.674928 15255.446778 > 33050.861013 73982.100407 >> > > Is it strange or did I miss something ? You missed something. It is not clear what you missed because some of your examples do not give the answer you say they give. -thomas ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.