On Sat, 8 Oct 2011, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 11-10-07 5:26 PM, Carl Witthoft wrote:
Just wondering here -- I tested and found to my delight that
% round(325.4,-2)
[1] 300
gave me exactly what I would have expected (and wanted). Since it's not
explicitly mentioned in the documentation that negative 'digits' is
allowed, I just wanted to ask whether this behavior is intentional or a
happy turn of events. I'm always paranoid that something not explicitly
documented might disappear in future revisons.
It is intentional, and one of the regression tests confirms that it's there,
so it won't disappear by mistake, and would be very unlikely to disappear
intentionally.
It needs careful documentation though (as do the corner cases of
signif). Things like
round(325.4,-3)
[1] 0
signif(325.4,-3)
[1] 300
signif(325.4,0)
[1] 300
may not be what you expect.
Sometimes it is better not to document things than try to give precise
details which may get changed *and* there will be useRs who misread
(and maybe even file bug reports on their misreadings). The source is
the ultimate documentation.
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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