sprintf() question

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Harding [mailto:Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk] 
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 3:32 PM
To: Daniel Nordlund
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: RE: [R] sprintf() question

On 17-May-09 22:03:19, Daniel Nordlund wrote:

When I type the following, I get results different from what I
expected. 

sprintf('%a',3)

[1] "0x1.8"

Shouldn't the result be

[1] "0x1.8p+2"

Well, not "p+2" but "p+1"
  (0x1.8 = 1.1000[2] ; *2 = 11.000[2] = 3[10]) ;
however, I get:

  sprintf('%a',3)
  # [1] "0x1.8p+1"

which is indeed correct.

  R version 2.9.0 (2009-04-17) ## Same as yours
  platform  i486-pc-linux-gnu  ## Different from yours ...

which perhaps suggests that there may be a mis-compilation in the
Windows version.

Ted.

I read through the help ?sprintf and didn't find anything 

that changed

my expectation.  What am I misunderstanding?  I am using 

R-2.9.0 binary

from CRAN on Windows XP Pro, and my session info is

sessionInfo()

R version 2.9.0 (2009-04-17) 
i386-pc-mingw32 

locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
States.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United
States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  

methods   base   

Thanks for any enlightenment.