Message-ID: <20050413021138.60353.qmail@web31310.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Date: 2005-04-13T02:11:37Z
From: Vivek Rao
Subject: Why is 1 a double?
Based on examples in R books and the syntax of other
programming languages, I expected that
n <- 10
assigns the integer 10 to n, but typeof(n) is actually
a double. The subscripting expression x[1] is valid,
but sprintf("\n %d",1) is not, giving the error
Error in sprintf("\n %d", 1) : use format %f, %e or %g
for numeric objects
One must use instead sprintf("\n %d",as.integer(1)).
Two questions:
(1) When one intends to define an integer variable,
should a construction such as
n <- as.integer(10)
be used? Most examples I have seen don't do this.
(2) Why wasn't the S language defined so that
typeof(1) is "integer" rather than "double"?