Stefan Koch wrote:
"Ralf W. Grosse-Kunstleve" <rwgk@yahoo.com> writes:
One place where I think the over general approach limits the class directly is in the length member function. You have this implemented as sqrt( x^2 + y^2 + z^2 ). The preferred way to implement this for vectors of floating point types is as m * sqrt( (x/m)^2 + (y/m)^2 + (z/m)^2 ) where m is max( x,y,z). This way there is no chance of internal overflow in the calculations when the components approach the limit of the floating point type used. Of course, if the vector type is also to be used with integers as the components (as I assume you support due to the presence of the % operator, and the comment of this class also supporting color representations) this trick does not work.
There are a million different ways to define a norm. It should be up to the user to specify which norm he actually wants to use instead of being hardcoded IMHO.
You also made an interesting design choice in allowing the * operator to be used as the dot product between two vectors. I choose not do do this, but to provide a non operator function of dot (much like cross for cross products). The reason for this is that there are three types of vector products that can be useful between two vectors x, y:
1. dot product r = sum x_i * y_i 2. element by element product r_i = x_i * y_i 3. cross product.
You forgot the inner product where: r = sum conjugate(x_i) * y_i.
For generic vectors the cross product is not appropriate, but the first two are. The dot product of the obvious choice from a linear algebra standpoint. For generic n-dimensional vectors, it has been my experience that it is more common to want to element wise product. Matrix programs like maple and octave define two operators ( * and .* ) to provide both. Numerical Python provides only the element wise product as an operator.
For these reasons there did not seem to be an obvious choice for the * operator between two 3-D vectors, so I chose to make it a separate function.
And I think the inner-product is more appropriate '-). Just to say that it rather depends on personal preference. The problem is that there are not enough operators available but on the other side: is it necessary to overload operator* ?
Feel free to look at my implementation. It is available at http://isolda.com/vector3/index.html