[R] Comparison of numeric and character vectors

[Ista Zahn]

Hi all,

I just discovered that R considers characters to be really big:

> "a" > 999
[1] TRUE
> "a" > 9e307
[1] TRUE
> "a" > 9e308
[1] FALSE

and that some characters are literally infinitely big:

> "Z" >= Inf
[1] TRUE

although not all:

> "a" > Inf
[1] FALSE


This came as a surprise to me (although it is quite possibly a trivial
issue), and I'd appreciate any information about why R considers
character vectors to even be comparable to numeric vectors, and why it
considers characters to have very large values.

Thanks!

Ista