as.complex
On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Erich Neuwirth wrote:
as.complex("2+1i") -> 2+1i
as.complex("2+i") -> NA
Does somebody have a modified version of as.complex
which does the coercion in a less strict manner and
produces a complex number also for strings like the
second example?
Perhaps it would even make sense to change the behavior
of as.complex to handle the second case.
After all, this is an established way of writing
complex numbers in some programming tools
able to deal with complex numbers.
R does document that 1i is required, and as.complex uses the same rules for entering complex numbers as e.g. using them as part of an arithmetic expression. Consistency is very important in a programming language. It is easy to change 2+i to 2+1i using sub(), for example.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595