Dear Ista,
This is a consequence of coercion of the numbers to character:
> c("Z", "a", 999, Inf)
[1] "Z" "a" "999" "Inf"
> sort(c("Z", "a", 999, Inf))
[1] "999" "a" "Inf" "Z"
I hope this helps,
John
On Tue, 3 Jan 2012 17:56:29 -0500
Ista Zahn <istaz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just discovered that R considers characters to be really big:
>
> > "a" > 999
> [1] TRUE
> > "a" > 9e307
> [1] TRUE
> > "a" > 9e308
> [1] FALSE
>
> and that some characters are literally infinitely big:
>
> > "Z" >= Inf
> [1] TRUE
>
> although not all:
>
> > "a" > Inf
> [1] FALSE
>
>
> This came as a surprise to me (although it is quite possibly a trivial
> issue), and I'd appreciate any information about why R considers
> character vectors to even be comparable to numeric vectors, and why it
> considers characters to have very large values.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ista
>
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