[Rd] Where does L come from?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 25/08/2018 4:49 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote:
> The choice of the L suffix in R to mean "R integer type", which
> is mapped to the "int" type at the C level, and NOT to the "long int"
> type, is really unfortunate as it seems to be misleading and confusing
> a lot of people.

Can you provide any evidence of that (e.g. a link to a message from one 
of these people)?  I think a lot of people don't really know about the L 
suffix, but that's different from being confused or misleaded by it.

And if you make a criticism like that, it would really be fair to 
suggest what R should have done instead.  I can't think of anything 
better, given that "i" was already taken, and that the lack of a decimal 
place had historically not been significant.  Using "I" *would* have 
been confusing (3i versus 3I being very different).  Deciding that 3 
suddenly became an integer value different from 3. would have led to 
lots of inefficient conversions (since stats mainly deals with floating 
point values).

Duncan Murdoch


> 
> The fact that nowadays "int" and "long int" have the same size on most
> platforms is only anecdotal here.
> 
> Just my 2 cents.
> 
> H.
> 
> On 08/25/2018 10:01 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>>
>> On 25 August 2018 at 09:28, Carl Boettiger wrote:
>> | 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!
>>
>> It does per my copy (dated 1990 !!) of the 2nd ed of Kernighan & Ritchie.  It
>> explicitly mentions (sec 2.2) that 'int' may be 16 or 32 bits, and 'long' is
>> 32 bit; and (in sec 2.3) introduces the I, U, and L labels for constants.  So
>> "back then when" 32 bit was indeed long.  And as R uses 32 bit integers ...
>>
>> (It is all murky because the size is an implementation detail and later
>> "essentially everybody" moved to 32 bit integers and 64 bit longs as the 64
>> bit architectures became prevalent.  Which is why when it matters one should
>> really use more explicit types like int32_t or int64_t.)
>>
>> Dirk
>>
>