ABSTRACT
When using a computer to perform intensive numerical calculations, there are two important issues we should bear in mind: accuracy and speed.
In this chapter we will consider technical details about how computers operate, and their ramifications for programming practice, particularly within R. We look at how computers represent numbers, and the effect that this has on the accuracy of computation results. We also discuss the time it takes to perform a computation and programming techniques for speeding things up. Finally we consider the effects of memory limitations on computation efficiency.
