Built-in Constants

Description

Constants built into R.

Usage

LETTERS
letters
month.abb
month.name
pi

Details

R has a small number of built-in constants (there is also a rather larger library of data sets which can be loaded with the function data).

The following constants are available:

• LETTERS: the 26 upper-case letters of the Roman alphabet;

• letters: the 26 lower-case letters of the Roman alphabet;

• month.abb: the three-letter abbreviations for the English month names;

• month.name: the English names for the months of the year;

• pi: the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

These are implemented as variables in the base name space taking appropriate values.

References

Becker, R. A., Chambers, J. M. and Wilks, A. R. (1988) The New S Language. Wadsworth & Brooks/Cole.

See Also

data, DateTimeClasses.

Quotes for the parsing of character constants, NumericConstants for numeric constants.

Examples

## John Machin (ca 1706) computed pi to over 100 decimal places
## using the Taylor series expansion of the second term of
pi - 4*(4*atan(1/5) - atan(1/239))

## months in English
month.name
## months in your current locale
format(ISOdate(2000, 1:12, 1), "%B")
format(ISOdate(2000, 1:12, 1), "%b")