[Rd] large integer values

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 14/05/2014 10:37, Adrian Dușa wrote:
> Dear devels,
>
> I need to create a (short) vector in C, which contains potentially very
> large numbers, exponentially to the powers of 2.

This isn't an R question, except in so far that R mandates the usual 
convention of C <int> being 32-bit.  However

1) You should use an unsigned integer type.
2) Most compilers have uint64_t but C99/C11 do not require it.  They 
require uint_fast64_t and uintmax_t (which is the widest unsigned int) 
types.
3) double will hold much larger powers, and functions like pow_di (where 
supported) or pow will compute them efficiently for you.  And R has 
R_pow_di in Rmath.h.

>
> This is my test example:
>
> lgth = 35;
> int power[lgth];
> power[lgth - 1] = 1;
> for (j = 1; j < lgth; j++) {
>      power[lgth - j - 1] = 2*power[lgth - j];
> }
>
> Everything works ok until it reaches the limit of 2^32:
>
> power: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192,
> 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576, 2097152, 4194304,
> 8388608, 16777216, 33554432, 67108864, 134217728, 268435456, 536870912,
> 1073741824, -2147483648, 0, 0, 0
>
> How should I declare the "power" vector, in order to accept integer values
> larger then 2^32?
>
> Thanks very much in advance,
> Adrian
>
>


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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