[R] Unintended behaviour of stats::time not returning integers for the first cycle

[Andreï V. Kostyrka]

Dear all,



I was using stats::time to obtain the year as a floor of it, and
encountered a problem: due to a rounding error (most likely due to its
reliance on the base::seq.int internally, but correct me if I am wrong),
the actual number corresponding to the beginning of a year X can still be
(X-1).9999999..., resulting in the following undesirable behaviour.



One of the simplest ways of getting the year from a ts object is
floor(time(...)). However, if the starting time cannot be represented
nicely as a power of 2, then, supposedly integer time does not have a
.000000... mantissa:



x <- ts(2:252, start = c(2002, 2), freq = 12)

d <- seq.Date(as.Date("2002-02-01"), to = as.Date("2022-12-01"), by =
"month")

true.year <- rep(2002:2022, each = 12)[-1]

wrong.year <- floor(as.numeric(time(x)))

tail(cbind(as.character(d), true.year, wrong.year), 15) # Look at 2022-01-01

print(as.numeric(time(x))[240], 20) # 2021.9999999999997726, the floor of
which is 2021



Yes, I have read the 'R inferno' book and know the famous '0.3 != 0.7 -
0.4' example, but I believe that the expected / intended behaviour would be
actually returning round years for the first observation in a year. This
could be achieved by rounding the near-integer time to integers.



Since users working with dates are expecting to get exact integer years for
the first cycle of a ts, this should be changed. Thank you in advance for
considering a fix.



Yours sincerely,

Andreï V. Kostyrka

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