HaloO, Jonathan Lang wrote:
Complex numbers come in two representations: rectilinear coordinates and polar coordinates:
I think there's also the Riemanian two angle form of the complex number sphere with r = 0.5 around (0,0,0.5) touching the plane at the origin (0,0) and reaching up to (0,0,1) in space. But admittedly the resulting math is that of projective space. Then there is the classic fact that you should make e.g. role Complex an intentional supertype of Num while the class Complex needs a wider extensional type with the added imaginary part in one form or another. As Luke pointed out, a plain role/class pair might not be enough to model the structural properties of the communalities and differences of Num and Complex. We need to define a family of related types that manage the different interpretations of a 2-tupel of Nums while sharing the underlying data layout---not to mention to be compatible with more generic vector stuff like the scalar product. Another idea is to model nums to have a directional bit where the polar complex have a full range angle. --
