One place where I've been caught by -ve zeros is with unit tests. If
identical(-0, 0) returns FALSE, and the object storage doesn't preserve
-ve zeros, that can lead to test failures that are tricky to debug.
However, it doesn't look like that is too much a problem in the current
incarnation of R, at least running under Linux:
* identical(-0, 0) returns TRUE
* save/load preserves -ve zero
* however dump() does NOT preserve -ve zero
The fact that identical(-0,0) is TRUE means that we have the situation
where it is possible that identical(x, y) != identical(f(x), f(y)). I
don't know if this is a real problem anywhere.
> x <- 0
> y <- -0
> 1/x
[1] Inf
> 1/y
[1] -Inf
> identical(x, y)
[1] TRUE
> ### there exists f,x,y such that identical(x, y) != identical(f(x), f(y))
> identical(1/x, 1/y)
[1] FALSE
> ### save/load preserves -ve zero
> save("y", file="y.rda")
> remove("y")
> load("y.rda")
> 1/y
[1] -Inf
> identical(x, y)
[1] TRUE
> ### dump does not preserve -ve zero
> dump("y", file="y.R")
> remove("y")
> source("y.R")
> y
[1] 0
> 1/y
[1] Inf
> version
_
platform x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
arch x86_64
os linux-gnu
system x86_64, linux-gnu
status
major 2
minor 5.1
year 2007
month 06
day 27
svn rev 42083
language R
version.string R version 2.5.1 (2007-06-27)
>
-- Tony Plate
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