On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 01:33:22PM -0700, Neil Toronto wrote: > > Also, I've been considering allowing negative axis numbers and row > indexes. Need feedback on how helpful it would be vs. confusing and > error-hiding.
The last big matrix library I've been in any way associated with was Torrix, a library for Algol 68. The convention that they used there was that matrices had infinitely many rows and columns, indexed by the integers, but that all but a finite number of entries were zero. This operations on what the user thought of as 7x7 matrices acted as if they were infinite-extent matrices instead. The difference came in the ease which which they could handle matrices of different sizes (even with different index origins) in a semantically simple way. That apparently was appreciated by its users, though I might have considered some of these machinations to be usefully reported as type violations. -- hendrik ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
