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Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?


From: Jude DaShiell
Subject: Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2015 03:58:56 -0400 (EDT)
User-agent: Alpine 2.11 (NEB 23 2013-08-11)

vectors are how elisp got used to write functions that do statistics I think. The vmean() function being one example and vmedian() being another. Unfortunately org-mode hasn't got a vmode() function to go along with those two which is why I use datamash to calculate my helath statistics.

On Sat, 17 Oct 2015, Aur?lien Aptel wrote:

Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 21:11:23
From: Aur?lien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com>
To: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?

I'm just nitpicking, but:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 3:12 AM, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
direction and magnitude (in particular, it doesn't
have a position). But whatever the math, isn't that (a

The direction and the position you're talking about are geometry
concepts. Linear algebra is just a tool that can be used to model many
things e.g. in mechanics to represent forces, in euclidian geometry to
represent positions *or* directions, you can even used them to model
text documents [1] etc. In pure linear algebra, "direction" and
"position" are not defined for vectors. You could argue that elisp is
using vectors to model a specific concept (constant time random access
objects) and as such deserves its own notation, different from the
list.

See? It's all a matter of perspective.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model



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