R devel - Oct 2017 - range function with finite=T and logical parameters

Hi!

I was wondering about the behavior of the range function wrt. logical NAs:
> range(c(0L, 1L, NA), finite=T)
[1] 0 1
> range(c(F, T, NA), finite=T)
[1] NA NA

The documentation is quite clear that "finite = TRUE includes na.rm =
TRUE?, so that I would have assumed that these two snippets would produce the
same result.

- Lukas

>>>>> Lukas Stadler <lukas.stadler at oracle.com>
>>>>>     on Mon, 23 Oct 2017 15:56:55 +0200 writes:
    > Hi!
    > I was wondering about the behavior of the range function wrt. logical
NAs:

    >> range(c(0L, 1L, NA), finite=T)
    > [1] 0 1
    >> range(c(F, T, NA), finite=T)
    > [1] NA NA

    > The documentation is quite clear that "finite = TRUE includes
na.rm = TRUE?, so that I would have assumed that these two snippets would
produce the same result.

    > - Lukas


I agree.  Further, another informal "rule" would require that the two
calls

     range(L, *)  
     range(as.numeric(L), *)

are equivalent for logical vectors L without attributes.
I'll look into fixing this by an obvious change to (R-level)
range.default().

------

Note for the more advanced ones -- i.e. typical R-devel readers :

T and F are variables in R.  For that reason, using the language
keywords TRUE and FALSE is much preferred in such cases.  For
some tests we'd even use

    T <- FALSE

or even

    delayedAssign("F", stop("do not use 'F'  when
programming with R"))

before running the tests -- just do ensure that the code to be
tested does not use these short forms.


Thank you, Lukas,  for the report!

Best,
Martin

FYI this has been fixed in R-devel by Martin
Tomas

On 10/23/2017 06:36 PM, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> Lukas Stadler <lukas.stadler at oracle.com>
>>>>>>      on Mon, 23 Oct 2017 15:56:55 +0200 writes:
>      > Hi!
>      > I was wondering about the behavior of the range function wrt.
logical NAs:
>
>      >> range(c(0L, 1L, NA), finite=T)
>      > [1] 0 1
>      >> range(c(F, T, NA), finite=T)
>      > [1] NA NA
>
>      > The documentation is quite clear that "finite = TRUE
includes na.rm = TRUE?, so that I would have assumed that these two snippets
would produce the same result.
>
>      > - Lukas
>
>
> I agree.  Further, another informal "rule" would require that the
two calls
>
>       range(L, *)
>       range(as.numeric(L), *)
>
> are equivalent for logical vectors L without attributes.
> I'll look into fixing this by an obvious change to (R-level)
> range.default().
>
> ------
>
> Note for the more advanced ones -- i.e. typical R-devel readers :
>
> T and F are variables in R.  For that reason, using the language
> keywords TRUE and FALSE is much preferred in such cases.  For
> some tests we'd even use
>
>      T <- FALSE
>
> or even
>
>      delayedAssign("F", stop("do not use 'F'  when
programming with R"))
>
> before running the tests -- just do ensure that the code to be
> tested does not use these short forms.
>
>
> Thank you, Lukas,  for the report!
>
> Best,
> Martin
>
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