[Rd] Where does L come from?

[Adam M. Dobrin]

most likely L comes from Michel or Obelisk.

http://img.izing.ml/MARSHALL.html = why you are making Mars colonization
(and space) "just a game"
http://img.izing.ml/IT.html = why i could care less.
ᐧ

On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 11:30 PM, William Dunlap via R-devel <
r-devel using r-project.org> wrote:

> >  the lack of a decimal place had historically not been significant
>
> Version 4 of S (c. 1991) and versions of S+ based on it treated a sequence
> of digits without a decimal  point as integer.
>
> Bill Dunlap
> TIBCO Software
> wdunlap tibco.com
>
> On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 4:33 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> >
> >
> >> The fact that nowadays "int" and "long int" have the same size on most
> >> platforms is only anecdotal here.
> >>
> >> Just my 2 cents.
> >>
> >> H.
> >>
> >> On 08/25/2018 10:01 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> On 25 August 2018 at 09:28, Carl Boettiger wrote:
> >>> | I always thought it meant "Long" (I'm assuming R's integers are long
> >>> | integers in C sense (iirrc one can declare 'long x', and it being
> >>> common to
> >>> | refer to integers as "longs"  in the same way we use "doubles" to
> mean
> >>> | double precision floating point).  But pure speculation on my part,
> so
> >>> I'm
> >>> | curious!
> >>>
> >>> It does per my copy (dated 1990 !!) of the 2nd ed of Kernighan &
> >>> Ritchie.  It
> >>> explicitly mentions (sec 2.2) that 'int' may be 16 or 32 bits, and
> >>> 'long' is
> >>> 32 bit; and (in sec 2.3) introduces the I, U, and L labels for
> >>> constants.  So
> >>> "back then when" 32 bit was indeed long.  And as R uses 32 bit integers
> >>> ...
> >>>
> >>> (It is all murky because the size is an implementation detail and later
> >>> "essentially everybody" moved to 32 bit integers and 64 bit longs as
> the
> >>> 64
> >>> bit architectures became prevalent.  Which is why when it matters one
> >>> should
> >>> really use more explicit types like int32_t or int64_t.)
> >>>
> >>> Dirk
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> > ______________________________________________
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> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
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