Hi Charles, Probably for the same reason it doesn't have short int, short unsigned int, long int, long unsigned int, long long int, long long unsigned int, long double etc... There are many built-in types in C and, in order to keep things simple, I guess the line had to be drew somewhere. Said otherwise, I don't think the atomic types in R were ever meant to reflect exactly what's available in C.
Note that some CRAN packages (e.g. bit64) try to remedy this by providing support for atomic-like types that are not natively supported by R. I don't know if there is one for float though. Cheers, H. On 06/30/2015 09:42 AM, 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? Regards, Charles [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
-- Hervé Pagès Program in Computational Biology Division of Public Health Sciences Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center 1100 Fairview Ave. N, M1-B514 P.O. Box 19024 Seattle, WA 98109-1024 E-mail: hpa...@fredhutch.org Phone: (206) 667-5791 Fax: (206) 667-1319 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel