Ugh, sounds like competing priorities.
* maintain type consistency
* minimize storage (= current version, since 3.0.0)
* maximize utility for large lambda (= proposed change)
* keep user interface, and code, simple (e.g., it would be easy enough
to add a switch that provided user control of int vs double return value)
* backward compatibility
On 2020-01-20 12:33 p.m., Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> Benjamin Tyner
>>>>>> on Mon, 20 Jan 2020 08:10:49 -0500 writes:
>
> > On 1/20/20 4:26 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
> >> Coming late here -- after enjoying a proper weekend ;-) --
> >> I have been agreeing (with Spencer, IIUC) on this for a long
> >> time (~ 3 yrs, or more?), namely that I've come to see it as a
> >> "design bug" that rpois() {and similar} must return return typeof()
> "integer".
> >>
> >> More strongly, I'm actually pretty convinced they should return
> >> (integer-valued) double instead of NA_integer_ and for that
> >> reason should always return double:
> >> Even if we have (hopefully) a native 64bit integer in R,
> >> 2^64 is still teeny tiny compared .Machine$double.max
> >>
> >> (and then maybe we'd have .Machine$longdouble.max which would
> >> be considerably larger than double.max unless on Windows, where
> >> the wise men at Microsoft decided to keep their workload simple
> >> by defining "long double := double" - as 'long double'
> >> unfortunately is not well defined by C standards)
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> > Martin if you are in favor, then certainly no objection from me! ;-)
>
> > So now what about other discrete distributions e.g. could a similar
> > enhancement apply here?
>
>
> >> rgeom(10L, 1e-10)
> > [1] NA 1503061294 NA NA 1122447583 NA
> > [7] NA NA NA NA
> > Warning message:
> > In rgeom(10L, 1e-10) : NAs produced
>
> yes, of course there are several such distributions.
>
> It's really something that should be discussed (possibly not
> here, .. but then I've started it here ...).
>
> The NEWS for R 3.0.0 contain (in NEW FEATURES) :
>
> * Functions rbinom(), rgeom(), rhyper(), rpois(), rnbinom(),
> rsignrank() and rwilcox() now return integer (not double)
> vectors. This halves the storage requirements for large
> simulations.
>
> and what I've been suggesting is to revert this change
> (svn rev r60225-6) which was purposefully and diligently done by
> a fellow R core member, so indeed must be debatable.
>
> Martin
>
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