As long as we're on this point about not many users knowing about "L" notation, I'm going bump my earlier suggestion that it be at least mentioned in the `? integer` documentation page: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2018-May/076203.html
Cheers, -Thomas > From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> > To: =?UTF-8?B?SGVydsOpIFBhZ8Oocw==?= <hpa...@fredhutch.org>, Dirk > Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org>, Carl Boettiger <cboet...@gmail.com> > Subject: Re: [Rd] Where does L come from? > > On 25/08/2018 4:49 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote: > > The choice of the L suffix in R to mean "R integer type", which > > is mapped to the "int" type at the C level, and NOT to the "long int" > > type, is really unfortunate as it seems to be misleading and confusing > > a lot of people. > > Can you provide any evidence of that (e.g. a link to a message from one > of these people)? I think a lot of people don't really know about the L > suffix, but that's different from being confused or misleaded by it. > > And if you make a criticism like that, it would really be fair to > suggest what R should have done instead. I can't think of anything > better, given that "i" was already taken, and that the lack of a decimal > place had historically not been significant. Using "I" *would* have > been confusing (3i versus 3I being very different). Deciding that 3 > suddenly became an integer value different from 3. would have led to > lots of inefficient conversions (since stats mainly deals with floating > point values). > > Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
