Message-ID: <4652C19F.1040509@statistik.uni-dortmund.de>
Date: 2007-05-22T10:10:39Z
From: Uwe Ligges
Subject: R 2.5.0 refuses to print enough digits to recover exact floating point values
In-Reply-To: <eb97335b0705220013m6f3e137cp147d429c46717e24@mail.gmail.com>
Zack Weinberg wrote:
> I have noticed that in R 2.5.0, no method of textual output will print
> a "double" mode quantity with more than 15 digits after the decimal
> point. From the help page (?print.default) it appears that this is
> intentional, since digits after the fifteenth may be uncertain.
> However, fifteen digits after the decimal point are not enough to
> represent all the values that an IEEE-double can take. (You need one
> more.) This means it is now impossible to write out data in textual
> format (e.g. in order to manipulate it with another program) and read
> back in exactly the same values. Some analyses are sensitive to this
> sort of extra rounding, especially if it happens repeatedly.
>
> I'd really appreciate some way of forcing R to print enough digits to
> represent every possible IEEE double value. I would also argue that
> this should be the default behavior of dump(), write.table() and
> friends, and save(...,ascii=TRUE), to prevent data loss.
Example:
formatC(exp(1), digits=100, width=-1)
Uwe Ligges
> [Tangentially, support for C99 hexadecimal notation for floating point
> values in input and output would also be nice, but wouldn't help much
> for interoperability, since very few programs understand it.]
>
> zw
>
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