>>>>> "JW" == John Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
JW> On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Larry Wall wrote: >> Sorry, I was just copying the designers of supercomputers in my >> terminology. So you can really blame Seymour Cray for misappropriating >> the term. On a Cray, "vector processing" is just operations applied >> in parallel to two one-dimensional lists. Unfortunately, I don't >> think you'll be able to get an apology from Seymour Cray these days... JW> I just want to chime in to support dropping the term "vector". JW> There are enough people who speak both math and CS that I have JW> noticed a lot of confusion caused by the term, not only in the JW> "outer product" vs "inner product" vs what-we-really-mean, but JW> also with stopping at the max or min when working with unequal JW> length lists. since the inputs are usually lists, why not call them list-ops? so >>+<< is list-plus and takes a list (or array ref) on either side and does a DWIM +. that is, element wise if two lists and a scalar added to each element if only one list. AFAICT all list ops always generate lists as a result (reduce is not a list op). JW> I would vote for "element-wise" for a relatively accurate JW> description, or "hyper" for short, fun, and JW> not-implying-anything-specific description. and >><< is the listifying op. it converts the op it surrounds into a list form that will return a list value. this is analogous to += being an assignment op. the key part is the list result or the assignment and it is a modification of a regular scalar op. uri -- Uri Guttman ------ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------- http://www.stemsystems.com --Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding- Search or Offer Perl Jobs ---------------------------- http://jobs.perl.org
