[R] "sum" bug?

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Kenneth Cabrera wrote:

> Dear R users and developers:
>
> I got this message when I try to make the summary of a numeric variable,

It's not really numeric = double: it is integer.  Try typeof(Dep).

>  > summary(Dep)
>
>   Min.   1st Qu.    Median      Mean   3rd Qu.      Max.
> 0.000e+00 1.192e+07 2.739e+07           6.538e+07 1.858e+09
> Warning message:
> Integer overflow in sum(.); use sum(as.numeric(.))
>
> and it fails to make the sum (for calculate the mean), but I don't
> understand the "Integer overflow"
>
> If I type the following command,
>
>  > summary(as.numeric(Dep))
>      Min.   1st Qu.    Median      Mean   3rd Qu.      Max.
> 0.000e+00 1.192e+07 2.739e+07 5.306e+07 6.538e+07 1.858e+09
>
>  it works fine.... but I still don't undertand way it doesn't work without
> the "as.numeric" coerce, when other functions like "sd()" worked fine.

Because a sum of integers is considered to be an integer, and mean(x)
is sum(x)/length(x) (in essence).  I think mean should coerce integers (or
logicals) to double.

-- 
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)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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