More discussion on this here: https://bugs.ecmascript.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309. CC Roger Andrews who had argued there that this should be 2- and 3- arguments only.
Personally, I don't see a strong case against allowing hypot to be variadic from re-reading that discussion, and do believe that would be a more expected behavior for ECMAScript, as for example Waldemar's last comment below points out. Luke -----Original Message----- From: Jason Orendorff [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, August 1, 2013 10:13 AM To: Allen Wirfs-Brock Cc: Luke Hoban; es-discuss Subject: Re: Math.hypot(1) On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock <[email protected]> wrote: > Waldemar: Why isn't it variadic? > Luke: 2 or 3 is the 99% use case. > Waldemar: 2 or 3 arguments is the 99% use case for max. > Waldemar: If it's not variadic and takes only 2 or 3 arguments, > you'll get silent mistakes. If you pass in four arguments, you'll get > the hypot of the first three, and the last one will be silently > ignored. That's bad. Heh! Thanks for the long quote. It's striking how many good points Waldemar has in this exchange. > Luke: Will go back to the experts to explore implementing variadic hypot. I don't know if I qualify as an expert, but variadic hypot would be no harder to implement than what is currently specified (probably easier, honestly), and no harder to optimize. To answer a question posed in that discussion, one way hypot(a, b) is better than sqrt(a*a + b*b) is that the latter underflows if the arguments are both small, and overflows if either argument is large. -j _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
