On 30/06/2015 17:42, Charles Determan 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?
You said it:
'it would require a large amount of work'
and not just for R but also for many packages that users would expect to
support data in that format.
By the time R started to spread (late 90s), most FPUs were primarily
double/extended precision and there was little or no speed advantage to
single-precision calculations. And although S[-PLUS] had a 'single'
type, we knew it was little used by then.
For a few people the storage size may matter (and for others the 32-bit
logicals are wasteful): although for most people RAM is cheap enough,
there are packages such as 'ff' which address this.
Regards,
Charles
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
