[Rd] [External] Re: rpois(9, 1e10)

[Benjamin Tyner]

On 1/20/20 4:26 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
> Coming late here -- after enjoying a proper weekend ;-) --
> I have been agreeing (with Spencer, IIUC) on this for a long
> time (~ 3 yrs, or more?), namely that I've come to see it as a
> "design bug" that  rpois() {and similar} must return return typeof() "integer".
>
> More strongly, I'm actually pretty convinced they should return
> (integer-valued) double instead of NA_integer_   and for that
> reason should always return double:
> Even if we have (hopefully) a native 64bit integer in R,
> 2^64 is still teeny tiny compared .Machine$double.max
>
> (and then maybe we'd have .Machine$longdouble.max  which would
>   be considerably larger than double.max unless on Windows, where
>   the wise men at Microsoft decided to keep their workload simple
>   by defining "long double := double" - as 'long double'
>   unfortunately is not well defined by C standards)
>
> Martin
>
Martin if you are in favor, then certainly no objection from me! ;-)

So now what about other discrete distributions e.g. could a similar 
enhancement apply here?

 > rgeom(10L, 1e-10)
  [1]         NA 1503061294         NA         NA 1122447583         NA
  [7]         NA         NA         NA         NA
Warning message:
In rgeom(10L, 1e-10) : NAs produced