On 6/9/06, Andy Little <andy@servocomm.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
In cases of vectors, I have only used vectors where all elements are one type of quantity. The vectors are used to represent position, direction and so on in 3 dimensions. A container that holds different quantities I would consider to be a tuple. But I stress I am not an expert.
I am not an expert either, but in practice I have used (incorrectly? should I have used a tuple or a custom data type?) vectors for representing latitude/longitude/altitude with mixed units. Something like vec3<double, unsigned short, double> for decimal degrees, meters, decimal degrees. I often need to move back and forth from those units to nautical miles and feet, and I bet a library like PQS would help me out more than meaningful variable names. I am ambivalent about whether the vector should allow mixed data types or not. I could settle for using a tuple instead, as long as vector functions like normalize(my_vec3) or length(my_vec) worked on tuple types as well. --Michael Fawcett