On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Brandon Kohn <blkohn@hotmail.com> wrote:
The term 'envelope' is used to refer to what I believe is known in the literature as an axis-aligned bounding box. This may come down to stylistic preference, but I would expect a Boost.Geometry to have a higher level of fidelity in the nomenclature.
FWIW, in GIS, "envelope" *is* the common term. I had a gaming background before moving into GIS so I too was more familiar with AABB than with envelope. Perhaps these higher level constructs should be in their own namespace, with terminology based on target domain. The underlying implementation could be the commonly accepted mathematical/academic term. Something like boost::gis envelope(const T &geometry); // forwards to minimum_bounding_rect boost::gfx aabb(const T &geometry); // forwards to minimum_bounding_rect --Michael Fawcett