First off, it is perfectly feasible to use R successfully for years and not need to know the answer to this question. R handles the differences between the (usual) numerics and integers for you in the background.
> is.numeric(1)
[1] TRUE
> is.integer(1)
[1] FALSE
> is.numeric(1L)
[1] TRUE
> is.integer(1L)
[1] TRUE
(Putting capital 'L' after an integer forces it to be stored as an integer.)
As you can see "integer" is a subset of "numeric".
> .Machine$integer.max
[1] 2147483647
> .Machine$double.xmax
[1] 1.797693e+308
Integers only go to a little more than 2 billion, while the other numerics can be much bigger. They can be bigger because they are stored as double precision floating point numbers. This means that the number is stored in two pieces: the exponent (like 308 above, except in base 2 rather than base 10), and the "significand" (like 1.797693 above).
Note that 'is.integer' is not a test of whether you have a whole number, but a test of how the data are stored.
One thing to watch out for is that the colon operator, :, will return integers if the start and end points are whole numbers. For example, 1:5 creates an integer vector of numbers from 1 to 5. You don't need to append the letter L.
> class(1:5)
[1] "integer"
Reference: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-numeric-and-integer-in-R