Where does L come from?

 the lack of a decimal place had historically not been significant

Version 4 of S (c. 1991) and versions of S+ based on it treated a sequence
of digits without a decimal  point as integer.

Bill Dunlap
TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 4:33 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:

On 25/08/2018 4:49 PM, Herv? Pag?s 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

The fact that nowadays "int" and "long int" have the same size on most
platforms is only anecdotal here.

Just my 2 cents.

H.

On 08/25/2018 10:01 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

On 25 August 2018 at 09:28, Carl Boettiger wrote:
| I always thought it meant "Long" (I'm assuming R's integers are long
| integers in C sense (iirrc one can declare 'long x', and it being
common to
| refer to integers as "longs"  in the same way we use "doubles" to mean
| double precision floating point).  But pure speculation on my part,
so I'm
| curious!

It does per my copy (dated 1990 !!) of the 2nd ed of Kernighan &
Ritchie.  It
explicitly mentions (sec 2.2) that 'int' may be 16 or 32 bits, and
'long' is
32 bit; and (in sec 2.3) introduces the I, U, and L labels for
constants.  So
"back then when" 32 bit was indeed long.  And as R uses 32 bit integers
...

(It is all murky because the size is an implementation detail and later
"essentially everybody" moved to 32 bit integers and 64 bit longs as
the 64
bit architectures became prevalent.  Which is why when it matters one
should
really use more explicit types like int32_t or int64_t.)

Dirk