"Duncan Murdoch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Seems to me the conversion from hex to decimal should be system independent > > (and makes working with colors much more convenient). Why isn't this system > > independent now? > > Presumably because nobody thought it was important enough to make it so. > R isn't a low level system programming language, so why should it > treat hex specially?
1) While generally I'd agree with your statement, manipulating colors is one place the ability to convert to/from hex would be quite nice. > rgb(1,0,0.5) [1] "#FF0080" rgb returns a hex string and then R makes manipulating this string somewhat difficult. One might want to use such color values to convert to a different color space, perform some sort of manipulation in that other color space, and then convert back to rgb. 2) I would think that one of R's mathematical abilities would be to provide a way to convert from any base to base 10, and from base 10 to any base. I haven't found this general math tool yet in R. Working with base-16 (or even base 2 sometimes) could be done with such a general math tool. 3) While I may be in a minority, I would even consider exporting IEEE floating-point numbers in hex form as a way to avoid any additional conversion losses converting to/from decimal. 4) Why not make working with "raw" data a little easier? readbin shows hex values but they are not easy to work with inside of R. > IntegerSize <- 4 # How do I get this value from R? > i <- -2:2 > i [1] -2 -1 0 1 2 > length(i) [1] 5 > object.size(i) [1] 52 > > writeBin(i, "big.bin", endian="big") > big <- readBin("big.bin", "raw", length(i)*IntegerSize) > big [1] ff ff ff fe ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 > > writeBin(i, "little.bin", endian="little") > little <- readBin("little.bin", "raw", length(i)*IntegerSize) > little [1] fe ff ff ff ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 > 5) Does R have a hex consistency problem? The color values start with a "#" for hex, but the as.numeric("#FF0080") isn't allowed? Thanks for your time. efg ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html