[R] Integers in S-Plus and R

Spencer Graves spencer.graves at pdf.com
Mon Sep 15 02:25:42 CEST 2003


	  I wish to comment on interesting and inconsistent behavior of both 
S-Plus and R with integers.

	  In R 1.7.1 for Windows, is.integer(2) is FALSE, though 
is.integer(1:2) and is.integer(max(1:2)) are both TRUE.  S-Plus 6.1 
produces TRUE for all three cases.

	  Meanwhile, as.integer(1e111) produces NA in R 1.7.1 and 2147483647 in 
S-Plus 6.1.  This behavior is consistent with the documentation in both 
cases:  R says, "The answer will be `NA' unless the coercion succeeds." 
  S-Plus says, "The numbers are truncated (moved to the closest integer 
...)."

	   Just one more thing to consider when trying to produce transportable 
scripts.

Spencer Graves




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