Technical Representation of Data
Edwin de Jonge, Mark van der Loo · 2018
This chapter discusses the technical representation of the most important datatypes: integers, real numbers, and text while exposing caveats one may encounter while programming with data. The mathematical set of real numbers is generally approximated with the standard double precision floating point representation. There are many ways in which text can be stored in computer memory, and over time more than a thousand of such text encoding schemes have been developed for various purposes, languages, and alphabets. The chapter introduces the terminology and point out common pitfalls and tools related to text representation. Locale settings are parameters and data present in an operating system that can be used by programmes to alter their behavior related to region, language, and encoding. Locale settings are standardized in the POSIX standard. Many operating systems, including the ones on which R is supported, have additional locale categories.