From thomas@biostat.washington.edu  Thu Dec  3 21:14:32 1998
From: thomas@biostat.washington.edu (Thomas Lumley)
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 13:14:32 -0800 (PST)
Subject: max(NULL)
In-Reply-To: <98Dec3.155312est.13444@mailgate.bank-banque-canada.ca>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.03.9812031312550.25808-100000@wompom.biostat.washington.edu>

On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> In Splus 3.3 and previous to R 0.63  max(NULL) returned NA and now it returns
> 
> > max(NULL)
> Warning in max(..., na.rm = na.rm) : no finite arguments to min/max; returning
> extreme.
> [1] -2147483647
> 
> Is this a bug or an intentional change?

It's intentional: ie max of an empty set is -Inf, min is +Inf 
For a while it happened silently, but now you get warned.

	-thomas

Thomas Lumley
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
University of Washington, Seattle


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max(NULL)
Thomas Lumley