title: Why is Date is being returned as type 'double'?
body: <p>I'm having some trouble working with the <code>as.Date</code> function in R.  I have a vector of dates that I'm reading in from a .csv file that are coming in as a factor of integers or as character (depending on how I read in the file, but this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the issue), formatted as <code>%m/%d/%Y</code>.</p>
  <p>I'm going through the file row by row, pulling out the date field and trying to convert it for use elsewhere using the following code:</p>
  <pre><code>tmpDtm &lt;- as.Date(as.character(tempDF$myDate), &quot;%m/%d/%Y&quot;)
  </code></pre>
  <p>This seems to give me what I want, for example, if I do this to a starting value of 12/30/2014, I get the value <code>&quot;2014-12-30&quot;</code> returned.  However, if I examine this value using <code>typeof()</code>, R tells me that it its data type is 'double'.  Additionally, if I try to bind this to other values and store it in a data frame using <code>c()</code> or <code>cbind()</code>, in the data frame, it winds up being stored as 16434, which looks to me like some sort of different internal storage value of a date.  I'm pretty sure that's what it is too because if I try to convert that value again using <code>as.Date()</code>, it throws an error asking for an origin.</p>
  <p>So, two questions:  Is this as expected?  If so, is there a more appropriate way to convert a date so that I actually end up with a date-typed object?</p>
  <p>Thank you</p>