I asked: > In this discussion of seq(), can anyone explain to > me _why_ seq(to=n) and seq(length=3) have different > types?
Martin Maechler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> replied: well, the explantion isn't hard: look at seq.default :-) That's the "efficient cause", I was after the "final cause". That is, I wasn't asking "what is it about the system which MAKES this happen" but "why does anyone WANT this to happen"? now if that really makes your *life* simpler, what does that tell us about your life ;-) :-) It tells you I am revising someone else's e-book about S to describe R. The cleaner R is, the easier that part of my life gets. In the future, we really might want to have a new type, some "long integer" or "index" which would be used both in R and C's R-API for indexing into large objects where 32-bit integers overflow. It would be useful needed now for large file support and for Java interfacing. I assume, we will keep the R "integer" == C "int" == 32-bit int forever, but need something with more bits rather sooner than later. But in any, case by then, some things might have to change in R (and C's R-API) storage type of indexing. seq: from, to, by, length[.out], along[.with] I'm about to fix this (documentation, not code). Please don't. There's a lot of text out there: tutorials, textbooks, S on-inline documentation, &c which states over and over again that the arguments are 'along' and 'with'. Change the documentation, and people will start writing length.out, and will that port to S-Plus? (Serious question: I don't know.) ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel