On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 11:00 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Is there a language where "- 2^2" gives a different answer than "-2^2"? > (Substitute ** or any other exponentiation operator for ^ if you > like.) This is important, because I'd like to avoid ever attempting any > important calculation in that language. >
I just checked that with javascript, and it gives the same answer so that's okay. I tried JS because it has some fun things to do with numbers (especially if you let it coerce strings): > "2" - "1" 1 > "2" + "1" "21" The Javascript Best Practices Document[1] says you should never use the plus sign for arithmetic addition, instead use a double negative and rely on "subtract" converting to numeric: > "2"- -"1" 3 Given that web pages written with JS get all their data from web content as strings, this can happen more often than you think. This is an example to show to everyone who says "Can we use + to concatenate strings in R please!?". Barry [1] A completely fictional publication I invented just now, but hey, I've seen worse than this. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
