This is documented on ?logical
. The pertinent section of which is:
Details:
‘TRUE’ and ‘FALSE’ are reserved words denoting logical constants
in the R language, whereas ‘T’ and ‘F’ are global variables whose
initial values set to these. All four are ‘logical(1)’ vectors.
Logical vectors are coerced to integer vectors in contexts where a
numerical value is required, with ‘TRUE’ being mapped to ‘1L’,
‘FALSE’ to ‘0L’ and ‘NA’ to ‘NA_integer_’.
The second paragraph there explains the behaviour you are seeing, namely 5 == 1L
and 5 == 0L
respectively, which should both return FALSE
, where as 1 == 1L
and 0 == 0L
should be TRUE for 1 == TRUE
and 0 == FALSE
respectively. I believe these are not testing what you want them to test; the comparison is on the basis of the numerical representation of TRUE
and FALSE
in R, i.e. what numeric values they take when coerced to numeric.
However, only TRUE
is guaranteed to the be TRUE
:
> isTRUE(TRUE)
[1] TRUE
> isTRUE(1)
[1] FALSE
> isTRUE(T)
[1] TRUE
> T <- 2
> isTRUE(T)
[1] FALSE
isTRUE
is a wrapper for identical(x, TRUE)
, and from ?isTRUE
we note:
Details:
....
‘isTRUE(x)’ is an abbreviation of ‘identical(TRUE, x)’, and so is
true if and only if ‘x’ is a length-one logical vector whose only
element is ‘TRUE’ and which has no attributes (not even names).
So by the same virtue, only FALSE
is guaranteed to be exactly equal to FALSE
.
> identical(F, FALSE)
[1] TRUE
> identical(0, FALSE)
[1] FALSE
> F <- "hello"
> identical(F, FALSE)
[1] FALSE
If this concerns you, always use isTRUE()
or identical(x, FALSE)
to check for equivalence with TRUE
and FALSE
respectively. ==
is not doing what you think it is.