Numeric comparison difficulty in R

I've never been a fan of all.equal for such things. It seems to me the tolerance works in mysterious ways sometimes. Why not just check for something greater than a tolerance less than 0.05

tol = 1e-5(a-b) >= (0.05-tol)

In general, without rounding and with just conventional logic I find straight logic better than all.equal

If x == y then x-y == 0. Perhaps x-y is not exactly 0 so for such cases I use

abs(x-y) <= tol

You have to set tolerance anyway for all.equal and this is more compact and straightforward than all.equal.

You could create this as a separate operator or overwrite the original >= function (probably not a good idea) if you want to use this approach frequently:

# using a toleranceepsilon <- 1e-10 # set this as a global setting`%>=%` <- function(x, y) (x + epsilon > y)# as a new operator with the original approach`%>=%` <- function(x, y) (all.equal(x, y)==TRUE | (x > y))# overwriting R's version (not advised)`>=` <- function(x, y) (isTRUE(all.equal(x, y)) | (x > y))> (a-b) >= 0.5[1] TRUE> c(1,3,5) >= 2:4[1] FALSE FALSE  TRUE

For completeness' sake, I'll point out that, in certain situations, you could simply round to a few decimal places (and this is kind of a lame solution by comparison to the better solution previously posted.)

round(0.58 - 0.08, 2) == 0.5