A further followup, at the risk of descending into minutia. The
culprit seems to be the emacs function string-to-number.
On my 32-bit Arch machine:
(string-to-number "123456789"): 123456789 (#o726746425, #x75bcd15)
(string-to-number "987654321"): 987654321.0
GNU Emacs 23.4.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.9) of
2012-02-01 on shirley.hoetzel.info
On a 64-bit Ubuntu (11.10) machine:
(string-to-number "123456789"): 123456789 (#o726746425, #x75bcd15)
(string-to-number "987654321"): 987654321 (#o7267464261, #x3ade68b1)
GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.5) of
2011-08-14 on allspice, modified by Debian
Ah, nice debugging!
That must be the issue, as I'm working on a 64-bit machine.
Maybe one workaround could be to prefix the numbers with a letter in
R-land so that emacs interprets them as strings.
Cheers,