[R] 0^0 computation in R : Why it is defined 1 in R ?

Jeff Newmiller jdnewmil at dcn.davis.CA.us
Mon May 26 19:17:12 CEST 2014


You might find searching the web on this topic educational. Consider [1] and [2], for example.

I doubt this will be changing, so you should do your exponentiation in a function that handles your special case.

By the way, as nice as RStudio might be, it is not R... it USES R. Examples like yours won't run as-is in vanilla R so are not really reproducible for (probably most) readers of this list. Please (re-)read the Posting Guide.

[1] http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.0.to.0.power.html
[2] http://www.askamathematician.com/2010/12/q-what-does-00-zero-raised-to-the-zeroth-power-equal-why-do-mathematicians-and-high-school-teachers-disagree/
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Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.

On May 26, 2014 5:16:21 AM PDT, ritwik_r at isical.ac.in wrote:
>Dear R helpers,
>
>
>today I found something interesting in R. 0^0 gives value 1 in R. But
>it
>is undefined in mathematics. During debugging a R code, I found it and
>it
>effects my program severely. So my question is why it is defined 1 in
>R?
>Is there any particular reason or its a bug in the R software?
>
>Here is one demo:
>
>*************************************************
>
>ff=function(u){
>  return( x^0 * u)
>}
>
>x=0
>zz=integrate(ff,lower=0,upper=1)$value
>zz
>
>
>
>> source('~/.active-rstudio-document')
>> zz
>[1] 0.5
>>
>
>*************************************************
>
>Looking forward to hear any response.
>
>Regards,
>
>Ritwik Bhattacharya
>Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>PLEASE do read the posting guide
>http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.



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