[Rd] Where does L come from?

[Thomas J. Leeper]

As long as we're on this point about not many users knowing about "L"
notation, I'm going bump my earlier suggestion that it be at least
mentioned in the `? integer` documentation page:
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2018-May/076203.html

Cheers,
-Thomas

> From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
> To: =?UTF-8?B?SGVydsOpIFBhZ8Oocw==?= <hpages using fredhutch.org>, Dirk
>         Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org>, Carl Boettiger <cboettig using gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Where does L come from?
>
> On 25/08/2018 4:49 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote:
> > The choice of the L suffix in R to mean "R integer type", which
> > is mapped to the "int" type at the C level, and NOT to the "long int"
> > type, is really unfortunate as it seems to be misleading and confusing
> > a lot of people.
>
> Can you provide any evidence of that (e.g. a link to a message from one
> of these people)?  I think a lot of people don't really know about the L
> suffix, but that's different from being confused or misleaded by it.
>
> And if you make a criticism like that, it would really be fair to
> suggest what R should have done instead.  I can't think of anything
> better, given that "i" was already taken, and that the lack of a decimal
> place had historically not been significant.  Using "I" *would* have
> been confusing (3i versus 3I being very different).  Deciding that 3
> suddenly became an integer value different from 3. would have led to
> lots of inefficient conversions (since stats mainly deals with floating
> point values).
>
> Duncan Murdoch