Hi Greg, I was referring to the single precision type. Your points were what I expected. I just wanted to ask the R community if there was any other reason than 'there wasn't any reason to implement it'.
Thanks, Charles On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 12:29 PM, Greg Snow <538...@gmail.com> wrote: > My understanding is that R does have a float type, it is just called > "double" instead of "float". > > If you are referring to a single precision floating point type, then R > does have the "as.single" function, but that does not really change > the way the number is stored, just sets a flag so that the proper > conversion is done when passing to the ".C" or ".fortran" functions. > The original S language and S+ would store things in single precision > if needed, but for computations these values were almost always > converted to doubles for precision. By the time R was developed the > memory saving of using single precision instead of double precision > was not as big an issue, so I expect that nobody ever considered it > worth the effort to fully implement the single precision storage. > > If you mean something else other than the above by "float data type" > then please give us more details so that we can better answer the > question. > > On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Charles Determan > <cdeterma...@gmail.com> wrote: > > This is strictly a curiosity question. I am aware the R doesn't possess > a > > float data type. I also don't mean to request that such functionality be > > implemented as I'm sure it would require a large amount of work with > > potential back compatibility conflicts. But I wanted to know why R has > > never had a float data type available? > > > > Regards, > > Charles > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > > ______________________________________________ > > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > > > -- > Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. > 538...@gmail.com > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel