Le 13/08/2012 19:56, Christian Mayer a écrit : > Am 13.08.2012 11:16, schrieb David Bruant: >> I'd like to talk about naming as well. "hypot" (for "Hypotenuse") is an >> accurate name for the 2 dimension case, but much less for 3 dimensions >> as far as I know (the English wikipedia page [2] doesn't mention the 3D >> case either) and even less for N-dimension. >> I think it would make sense to rename it. Maybe "euclidianDistance" (too >> long?), "distance" [3] (accurate mathematically, but may sound vague in >> the broader context of JavaScript), "eucl" (too cryptic?), other? > The correct mathematical name would be "norm". I'm glad we agree that "hypot" is inaccurate.
> And there are different ways a function could work and it still would be > a norm (see this section on the wikipedia page you've posted: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance#Distance_in_Euclidean_space; "In the Euclidean space Rn, the distance between two points is usually given by the Euclidean distance (2-norm distance). Other distances, based on other norms, are sometimes used instead." Euclidean distance (aka 2-norm distance) definition maps the one of the function currently named "hypot", specifically computing the squareroot of the sum of squares, so I don't see how "norm" is more correct in that case than "distance". > "norm" is a mathematical construct that gives a few guarantees: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_%28mathematics%29) > > Three norms are used quite often so they'd profit from a native function: > * 1-norm (usually the fastest to compute) > * 2-norm (hypot in the 2d case; usually the squared value is enough as > well as faster to compute, so it's much more often used in > numerical algorithms) > * infinity-norm (the least used variant) It seems that what you're asking for is something different than the current hypot function definition. David _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
