Douglas Bates wrote: > On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 11:08 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Thank you for all of you. Intuitively, 7 is an integer for people who live >> in this planet. It is just very difficult for me to believe that R does not >> think 7 is an integer but 7L is. >> >>> is.integer(7) # R 2.7.2 >>> >> [1] FALSE >> Thus, based on Martin's comments, I try it again on the S-PLUS 8.0 and it >> shows >> >>> is.integer(7) # S-PLUS 8.0 >>> >> [1] T >> >> Hopefully, someday and someone will fix it therefore, R users don't need to >> use as.integer(7) to tell R that 7 is an integer. >> > > My father taught me at an early age not to criticize the way that > someone else does something until after you have shown that you can do > it better. The fact that you don't agree with a design decision > doesn't mean that it is wrong and should be "fixed". > > We look forward to using the system for computing with data that you > will develop and make freely available and in which 7 will be stored > as an integer. In the meantime, if you want to use R then you will > just need to grit your teeth and accept that literal constants like > '7' are stored as floating point values and literal constant like '7L' > are stored as integers. > > >
good god. my father taught me that if i want to do business, or if i just want to do favours, i should listen to the customers. 'shut up and accept our design if you want to use our product', esp. if there are design issues which apparently cause *unnecessary* confusion, is kinda arogant. you don't need to be an emperor to be able to see that an emperor is naked; you'd better listen to -- and encourage -- folks that give you feedback, rather than trash them. of course, it is not an objective truth that letting integer(7) evaluate to FALSE is wrong; in Oz, for example, you can't add an integer to a float, and in Perl you can add whatever number to whatever string. these designs have their merits, and the 'how it is stored' story about 7 is not unreasonable -- but it does seem to be a wrong decision for a language focused mostly with statistical computations and not computer science concerned with how to represent an integer. you can always design a language where 7 is stored as a string by default, but it should be fine to listen to your users what they think about it. sorry for the reaction, but i thought you've missed something you shouldn't have. vQ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org 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.
