On Mon, 2011-11-21 at 14:41 +0000, Martyn Byng wrote: > I'm getting some strange behaviour when trying to use the power > operator > (a^b) when a is large and b is less than one: > > big <- .Machine$double.xmax > big > big^0.5 > sqrt(big) > > > big <- 1.797693134862315708384e+308 > > big^0.5 > [1] Inf > > sqrt(big) > [1] 1.340781e+154 > > > I'm guessing that this behaviour is not expected, or am I missing > something about ^?
On a recent Ubuntu 64bit install with R2.14.0 from the repositories, I get: > big <- .Machine$double.xmax > big [1] 1.797693e+308 > big^0.5 [1] 1.340781e+154 > sqrt(big) [1] 1.340781e+154 so it does seem to be specific either to your environment. -- Brian G. Peterson http://braverock.com/brian/ Ph: 773-459-4973 IM: bgpbraverock ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
