[R] Floats in Microsoft Basic format

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 10/08/2011 10:16 AM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >  On 10/08/2011 5:58 AM, taraxacum wrote:
> >>
> >>  Hi all,
> >>  I need to convert a floating point value from Microsoft Basic format to
> >>  IEEE
> >>  format.
> >>  There's a simple way to achieve this in R or I have to write my own
> >>  function?
> >>  (e.g. convert the C code below)
> >
> >  You'll need to write your own function.  It can be very similar to what you
> >  have below, except:
> >    - you'll need to produce double rather than single (easy, just produce a
> >  single and assign to a double, C does the conversion for you)
> >    - you need to change the args to your function to some that R understands.
>
>   Wouldn't it be easier, given a working C implementation, to write a
> wrapper that calls the C code? R isn't built for bit-twiddling, C very
> definitely is.

That's actually what I was suggesting.

Duncan Murdoch
>   Also, I imagine you may have a large number of these to change, in
> which case you could do it all with a single call to a C function that
> loops over the numbers from an R vector.
>
>   See the R docs for how to load compiled C into R.
>
> Barry