Constants                package:base                R Documentation

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")

