Why does the number 1e9999… (31 9s) cause problems in R?

Question

When entering 1e9999999999999999999999999999999 into R, R hangs and will not respond - requiring it to be terminated.

It seems to happen across 3 different

Answer 1

This is interesting, but I think R has systemic problems with parsing numbers that have very large exponents:

> 1e10000000000000000000000000000000
[1] 0
> 1e1000000000000000000000000000000
[1] Inf
> 1e100000000000000000000
[1] Inf
> 1e10000000000000000000
[1] 0
> 1e1000
[1] Inf
> 1e100
[1] 1e+100

There we go, finally something reasonable. According to this output and Joshua Ulrich's comment below, R appears to support representing numbers up to about 2e308 and parsing numbers with exponents up to about +2*10^9, but it cannot represent them. After that, there is undefined behavior apparently due to overflow.