Hello All.
I am running R 2.0.0 with a Win XP operating system. The same problem occured
with R 1.9.1 but not with R.1.3.1 on a Win NT computer.
My request is about the following problem with the sort function:
The vector price is a vector of 789 asset prices of the following form,
mode(price)
[1] "numeric"
price[1:10]
[1] 1.1315 1.1314 1.1313 1.1314 1.1315 1.1316 1.1315 1.1317
[9] 1.1316 1.1316
Then the returns are defined to be the differences,
ret <- diff(price)
ret[1:10]
[1] -1e-04 -1e-04 1e-04 1e-04 1e-04 -1e-04 2e-04 -1e-04
[9] 0e+00 0e+00
Here R recognizes the first two entries and also the second ones to be equal
(I did not found any two equal entries, where R didnt recognized this
relation),
ret[1]==ret[2]
[1] TRUE
ret[3]==ret[4]
[1] TRUE
But after sorting the vector, this ist not longer true,
[1] FALSE
Taking the difference of the first two entries yields
s[1]-s[2]
[1] -2.220446e-16
which seems to be a numerical artefact.
Is this a bug, or just a handling error by me?
Thanks a lot for your answers,
Kay Frederik Pilz
Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum
Germany
Kay.Pilz at rub.de