Question

This is a curiousity and I highly doubt you can do what I am asking because the concept is, well silly. If I were to round something can it be unrounded?

So:

x <- round(rnorm(10))
x

You have no idea what the original something is can you get back to the original numbers generated by rnorm?

I ask because when I write functions for users I often put rounding arguments in them to make display better but I always give the user control of the digits and allow independent control of digit rounding for list objects. That makes a function full of digits= arguments really quickly. I would put these arguments in the function internally if I knew the user could somehow magically re-extract the original values. I could leave the digits as are, assign to a class and use a print method but for a list this is a pain at best.

Answer 1

If you round the actual data itself, in general you cannot recover it. Instead you should change the display using a custom print or trying something like option(digits=3). In the very particular case of random number generation, you could recover the original data if you first set the seed (set.seed), remembered it and then re-generated the random data from the same seed.