From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
To: =?UTF-8?B?SGVydsOpIFBhZ8Oocw==?= <hpages at fredhutch.org>, Dirk
Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>, Carl Boettiger <cboettig at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Rd] Where does L come from?
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