[R] Floats in Microsoft Basic format

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/08/2011 5:58 AM, taraxacum wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>> I need to convert a floating point value from Microsoft Basic format to
>> IEEE
>> format.
>> There's a simple way to achieve this in R or I have to write my own
>> function?
>> (e.g. convert the C code below)
>
> You'll need to write your own function.  It can be very similar to what you
> have below, except:
>  - you'll need to produce double rather than single (easy, just produce a
> single and assign to a double, C does the conversion for you)
>  - you need to change the args to your function to some that R understands.

 Wouldn't it be easier, given a working C implementation, to write a
wrapper that calls the C code? R isn't built for bit-twiddling, C very
definitely is.

 Also, I imagine you may have a large number of these to change, in
which case you could do it all with a single call to a C function that
loops over the numbers from an R vector.

 See the R docs for how to load compiled C into R.

Barry