Variable Types
Variable types exist in all programming languages and will tell the computer how to store and access a variable.
First, know that all variables created in R will have a class and a type. You can look at the class or type of anything in R using the class() and typeof() functions, respectively.
The class of an object is a broad designation, for example, character, numeric, integer, and date. These are very broad categories, and type elaborates more specifically on what type of variable it is, for example, a variable of class date can be of type character or POSIXct, depending on how it is stored. Type drills down into the details of a variable and how it's been stored in R, though sometimes class and type can be the same. For ...
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