On 26-May-10 18:40:46, Barry Rowlingson wrote: > On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Wu Gong <gho...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I can only repeat your error message :) >> >>> n256 <- paste(rep("A",256),collapse="") >>> assign(n256, 1) >>> n257 <- paste(rep("A",257),collapse="") >>> assign(n257, 1) >> Error in assign(n257, 1) : variable names are limited to 256 bytes > > If a variable name can have 26 upper case + 26 lower case + 10 > numbers then the number of possible variable names is: > > 711659926691456588820198688981513283237719214167524272940980\ > 007340737850071505550367426050190853744948955339987662427844\ > 810850852717191846883823768674280839119270574786535774460628\ > 640384757837267418932039347078114901615267344319690975277428\ > 929737916031623809028545597238524149983532303848529517503894\ > 555603085813572927495336324076794731576794044444062823255544\ > 802787912646756996122962654809395519130134923611540639384237\ > 080197541181260772381917961683956924416 > > which should be enough for everyone (that's probably a lower > bound since names can have dots and underscores etc in them). > > I suspect the code is doing something very horrible with variable > names, and needs to be restructured to use lists or vectors or > arrays or anything other than encoding information into the > name of an object. > > I had to calculate 62^256 in Maxima since R thinks it's infinite. > Barry
Barry, Add in a couple of extras to the domain, for the "." and "_", and you get 64^256 = (2^6)^256 = 2^1536, which is easier to grasp. And I wouldn't bother with maxima myself -- bc will do: $ bc -l [banner stuff] 2^1536 241031242692103258858011660602831411291209324794568895135967\ 503906525739159180320066908502410734604966344876628088800478\ 786241697879495832496961298789077465145521333938162522477078\ 207791768149967684554313738782005759734585790459910946138712\ 209950796499781564134230067762947335528161742841179416396778\ 587037036896910922159194305423201156275845008057958785090099\ 371489228347664663118151506380487337518226050624699283789870\ 5971012525843324401232986857004760339316736 or, less precisely, 10 to the power: scale=200 l(2^1536)/l(10) 462.38207333987511584830294229682128911593965792579871945281\ 658029123817872551604657192025925353396025449135696603800890\ 228956346542109210521552742457041240329907655309444106648855\ 511190262212121781847591 Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-May-10 Time: 20:12:29 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.