[Rd] Where does L come from?

[William Dunlap]

Rich Calaway pointed out that S4 came out c. 1996-97, not 1991.

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 8:30 PM, William Dunlap <wdunlap using tibco.com> 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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>
>

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