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Rbitrary Standards

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Highlights

  • What’s the actual weirdest or most specific thing about R? NaNs.
  • An NaN is “not a number”; a numeric value that isn’t actually a value. In R these are just a form of NA; an NA in a character vector is an NA. An NA in a numeric vector is an NaN (or sometimes just an NA, depending on your compiler. Compilers are funny things.)
  • No, really. “NaN” to the user is the number 1954 to the computer. And the reason this is super-fun is why 1954 was picked - because it was Ross Ihaka’s year of birth.