Hi fellow devs, There is a nice patch up by Calvin (https://asterix-gerrit.ics.uci.edu/c/asterixdb/+/20126) that adds a variety of distance functions for vectors. The initial patch added a function like this: vector_distance(u,v,metric) Which would compute the distance between two arrays of the same length containing numerics, according to a metric, which is given as a string. The string would be, for example "euclidean", or "manhattan".
I wasn't particularly fond of this syntax- it was inspired from something else, and not a slight at Calvin's work. After discussing informally with Calvin and some others familiar with the patch, I changed the patch to instead add a separate function for each metric, like: euclidean_dist(u,v) manhattan_dist(u,v) ... and so on. To me it seems this fits better with the naming and syntax patterns we already have. Code-wise each function continues to share most of its implementation with the other vector distance calculation functions. Does anyone have any other thoughts or suggestions on the matter? -Ian
