[R] colSums in C

[David Brahm]

Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> writes:
> [isnan() is] not logically doing the same thing [as ISNA].
> NA is an NaN, but you can also get NaN from 0/0 like construction, and you
> may want the sum to be NaN in that case.

Luckily, isnan() seems to give nearly S-Plus-compatible results.  Here's an
S-Plus session:

S> x <- matrix(1:15, 3,5, dimnames=list(letters[1:3], LETTERS[1:5]))
S> x[1,1] <- x[1,3] <- x[ ,4] <- NA
S> x[2,2] <- x[2,3] <- 0/0
S> print(y <- colSums(x))
    A  B  C  D  E 
   NA NA NA NA 42
S> is.na(y)
   A B C D E 
   T T T T F
S> is.nan(y)
  [1] F T F F F
S> colSums(x, na.rm=T)
   A  B C D  E 
   5 10 9 0 42

and in R I get the same results (different printing) except for this line:
R> is.nan(y)
      A     B     C     D     E 
  FALSE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE FALSE   # (Note column C is different!)

Three points about colSums to glean from this:
1) In S-Plus, na.rm=T removes (sets to 0) NaN's as well as NA's.
2) A column full of NA's sums to 0 when na.rm=T.
3) In S-Plus, NaN + NA = NA,  but in R (as I've written it) NaN + NA = NaN.

I'm OK with that, so I think I'll keep isnan() (or its portable equivalent).


> There is also a portability issue in the availability of isnan(). R
> jumps through a few hoops to ensure that R_IsNA does sensible things
> on as many systems as possible, although we may be running out of IEEE
> non-compatible systems these days.

Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> also mentioned portability:
> Portability.  Not all possible ports of R have [isnan()], and R can be built
> without it.  But there are macros to cover that.

Is there a macro that is equivalent to (as fast as) isnan() when it exists?
ISNAN is definitely slower.

-- 
                              -- David Brahm (brahm at alum.mit.edu)
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