Stephen Milborrow wrote:
> In R, 0 ^ NaN yields Inf.  I would have expected NaN or perhaps 0. Is this 
> behaviour intended?
>   
Well, it certainly follows from the implementation.  In the R_pow C routine,

double R_pow(double x, double y) /* = x ^ y */
{
    if(x == 1. || y == 0.)
      return(1.);
    if(x == 0.) {
      if(y > 0.) return(0.);
      /* y < 0 */ return(R_PosInf);
    }

It does seem, however, that NaN is the logical result here, which I 
think results from changing the implementation to:

    if(x == 0.) {
      if(y > 0.) return(0.);
      else if(y < 0) return(R_PosInf);
      else return(y); /* NA or NaN, we assert */
    }

Other things being equal, `^` should follow the C pow() function for 
numeric arguments.  After writing pow() as an R function that calls this 
C function:

 > pow(0,NaN)
[1] NaN
 > pow(0,NA)
[1] NA
 > pow(0,0)
[1] 1

The second example presumably falls out because the C function returns 
its second argument if that is a NaN (which a numeric NA is, in C but 
not in R).  The modified code in R_pow mimics that behavior.

Along the line, notice that both R_pow and pow give 0^0 as 1.  (Just at 
a guess, C might give 0^-0 as Inf, but I don't know how to test that in R.)

Other opinions?

John


>   
>> sessionInfo()
>>     
> R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20)
> i386-pc-mingw32
>
> locale:
> LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United 
> States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United 
> States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> Steve Milborrow
> www.milbo.users.sonic.net
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
>   

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

