Extrema make sense for any collection you can sort. E.g.:
julia> words = shuffle!(map(chomp,open(readlines,"/usr/share/dict/words")))
235886-element Array{ASCIIString,1}:
"Lobelia"
"maddeningness"
"oases"
"kindler"
"upgang"
"inequable"
"stramony"
"rhagon"
"whizzer"
"intercollegian"
⋮
"drearily"
"dramatizer"
"furacity"
"opsistype"
"carrying"
"unfulminated"
"inadaptive"
"dermographism"
"rhabdomancy"
"exhaustively"
julia> maximum(words)
"zythum"
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 12:41 PM, Andrew Dabrowski <[email protected]>wrote:
> I had assumed that minimum only worked when T <: Real. A finite
> collection of elements of an arbitrary type need not have a max or min in
> any natural sense.
>
>
> On Tuesday, April 1, 2014 12:33:39 PM UTC-4, Stefan Karpinski wrote:
>>
>> Type stability is the main concern and consistency is the other. You want
>> minimum(::Vector{T}) to return an element of type T but not all T have an
>> infinite value.
>>
>>
