a < b < c is alway TRUE
On Fri, 6 Jul 2001 13:21:51 +0200, you wrote in message <3B45BB6F.6582.E1B7B at localhost>:
what's surprising is the following:
FALSE<1
[1] TRUE
FALSE>1
[1] FALSE
TRUE<1
[1] FALSE
TRUE>1
[1] FALSE because of symmetry i'd expect TRUE>1 to be TRUE.
In R like C, FALSE is 0 and TRUE is 1. This is a bad thing, but it's too late to change it now. With that substitution, all the results look reasonable: 0>1, 1<1 and 1>1 are all false, but 0<1 is true. Why a bad thing? Because it leads to absurdities like this whole thread has been discussing! What should they have done? They should have done what Fortran, Pascal, etc. do, and have a separate logical or boolean type that isn't automatically converted to a numerical type. In Pascal for instance, "3 < 2 < 1" is flagged as a syntax error, because you can't compare a boolean to an integer. If you really want to do the weird comparison that R is doing, you need to enter it as "ord(3 < 2) < 1", and any reader will see that you're doing something weird. Duncan Murdoch -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._