R help - Feb 2013 - Coercing of types when raising a number to a series of powers

I'm trying to produce a series of powers of a number as follows:

  |> 0.05^0:5
   [1] 1 2 3 4 5

This is not the result I expected. I guess some kind of coercion happened,
since,

  |> class(0.05^0:5)
   [1] "integer"

Could anyone explain me what is happening here?

Thanks,

  -Sergio.

Julio Sergio <juliosergio <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> I'm trying to produce a series of powers of a number as follows:
> 
>   |> 0.05^0:5

I'm sorry for the question. The answer is simple: the result is due to
operator precedence not to coercing:

  |> 0.05^(0:5)
  [1] 1.000e+00 5.000e-02 2.500e-03 1.250e-04 6.250e-06 3.125e-07

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-
> project.org] On Behalf Of Julio Sergio
> Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 6:13 PM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] Coercing of types when raising a number to a series of
> powers
> 
> I'm trying to produce a series of powers of a number as follows:
> 
>   |> 0.05^0:5
>    [1] 1 2 3 4 5
> 
> This is not the result I expected. I guess some kind of coercion
> happened,
> since,
> 
>   |> class(0.05^0:5)
>    [1] "integer"
> 
> Could anyone explain me what is happening here?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
>   -Sergio.
> 
It has to do with operator precedence.  '^' has higher precedence than
':'.  What you typed

   0.05^0:5

Was evaluated as 

   (0.5^0):5

What you should have typed was 

   0.05^(0:5)


Hope this is helpful,

Dan

Daniel J. Nordlund
Washington State Department of Social and Health Services
Planning, Performance, and Accountability
Research and Data Analysis Division
Olympia, WA 98504-5204