[R] a < b < c is alway TRUE

[Till Baumgaertel]

> Because it leads to absurdities like this whole thread has been discussing!
i think this is a misunderstanding: this thread is not from absurdistan but 
from userland.

> What should they have done?  They should have done what Fortran,
> Pascal, etc. do, and have a separate logical or boolean type that
> isn't automatically converted to a numerical type.  
in my understanding R compares better to an comuter algebra system like 
mathematica than to a programming language like pascal or so. 

i don't know the mathematica-syntax for the natural "3 < 2 < 1", but i think 
it's a BAD idea to force *users* to write something weired like "ord(3 < 2) < 
1". 

in an *application-oriented* statistical software-system natural syntax should 
be preferred to a "programmological"-syntax. thus it would be more user-
friendly to re-write the parser/scanner parts of R in a way that "3 < 2 < 1" is 
naturally-correct evaluated to FALSE. 

on the other hand, r is open-source and i could do it myself...

cu
till

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