Have you benchmarked these potential drawbacks for your usecase? Eg. memory depends on the structure of the identifies, given how R stores characters internally.
Given all the issues raised here, I would 100% provide a script for reading the data into R, if this is for distribution. Best, Kasper On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 12:28 PM, Nicolas Paris <nicolas.pa...@aphp.fr> wrote: > Right, they are identifiers. > > Storing them as String has drawbacks: > - huge to store in memory > - slow to process > - huge to index (by eg data.table columns indexes) > > Why not storing them as numeric ? > > Thanks, > > Le 20 janv. 2017 à 18h16, William Dunlap écrivait : > > If these are identifiers, store them as strings. If not, what sort of > > calculations do you plan on doing with them? > > Bill Dunlap > > TIBCO Software > > wdunlap tibco.com > > > > > > On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 6:33 AM, Nicolas Paris <nicolas.pa...@aphp.fr> > wrote: > > > Hello r users, > > > > > > I have to deal with int8 data with R. AFAIK R does only handle int4 > > > with `as.integer` function [1]. I wonder: > > > 1. what is the better approach to handle int8 ? `as.character` ? > > > `as.numeric` ? > > > 2. is there any plan to handle int8 in the future ? As you might know, > > > int4 is to small to deal with earth population right now. > > > > > > Thanks for you ideas, > > > > > > int8 eg: > > > > > > human_id > > > ---------------------- > > > -1311071933951566764 > > > -4708675461424073238 > > > -6865005668390999818 > > > 5578000650960353108 > > > -3219674686933841021 > > > -6469229889308771589 > > > -606871692563545028 > > > -8199987422425699249 > > > -463287495999648233 > > > 7675955260644241951 > > > > > > reference: > > > 1. https://www.r-bloggers.com/r-in-a-64-bit-world/ > > > > > > -- > > > Nicolas PARIS > > > > > > ______________________________________________ > > > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > -- > Nicolas PARIS > Responsable R & D > WIND - PACTE, Hôpital Rothschild ( RTH ) > Courriel : nicolas.pa...@aphp.fr > Tel : 01 48 04 21 07 > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel