--- Phil Steitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > I missed the beginning of this thread; my Yahoo mail has been strangely low > in > > activity the past two days. > > > > Rather than espouse an opinion on where these methods should go, let me ask > why > > a parallel sort would be so bad. Especially if you sorted by using an > index > > table. I did a clean-room implementation of index table sorting in Ruby a > few > > weeks ago for my wife, based on the text description of the algorithm in > _NR_ > > (I was very careful not to read the code -- though I'm pretty sure I had to > > type it in once and use it years ago in grad school, I sure wouldn't > remember > > even a line of it now). > > The use case that touched this off was validating the knot point array > passed in to spline interpolation. If the x[] values are not strictly > increasing, the activation is suspect, so I would prefer to throw rather > than speculatively sort the y[] vector in parallel. Same problem applies > to the constructor of the PolynomialSpline wrt x[] and polynomials[] > (where parallel sorting would be even more dubious). > > Phil
It just occurred to me that a use case that perhaps we have not considered is in graphics and scalable fonts, where relations that are not functions (i.e., they are multi-valued functions) can easily occur -- think of your favorite drawing program's ability to draw Bezier curves with loops in them. I know that font systems use cubic (Postscript) and quadratic (TrueType) curves to describe font outlines -- though that case doesn't necessarily argue for multivalued interpolating segments. Anyway, food for thought. Al __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
