[Rd] Where does L come from?

Carl Boettiger cboettig @ending from gm@il@com
Sat Aug 25 18:28:18 CEST 2018


I always thought it meant "Long" (I'm assuming R's integers are long
integers in C sense (iirrc one can declare 'long x', and it being common to
refer to integers as "longs"  in the same way we use "doubles" to mean
double precision floating point).  But pure speculation on my part, so I'm
curious!

On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 6:50 AM Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson using gmail.com>
wrote:

> Not that it brings closure, but there's also
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2017-June/074462.html
>
> Henrik
>
> On Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 06:40 Marc Schwartz via R-devel <
> r-devel using r-project.org>
> wrote:
>
> > On Aug 25, 2018, at 9:26 AM, Hadley Wickham <h.wickham using gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Would someone mind pointing to me to the inspiration for the use of
> > > the L suffix to mean "integer"?  This is obviously hard to google for,
> > > and the R language definition
> > > (
> https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-lang.html#Constants)
> > > is silent.
> > >
> > > Hadley
> >
> >
> > The link you have above, does reference the use of 'L', but not the
> > derivation.
> >
> > There is a thread on R-Help from 2012 ("Difference between 10 and 10L"),
> > where Prof. Ripley addresses the issue in response to Bill Dunlap and the
> > OP:
> >
> >   https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2012-May/311771.html
> >
> > In searching, I also found the following thread on SO:
> >
> >
> >
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22191324/clarification-of-l-in-r/22192378
> >
> > which had a link to the R-Help thread above and others.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Marc Schwartz
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
>
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