John wrote:
Huh? I think 'Isotropic' may need some clarification, I thought you meant just that distances in each coordinate's direction have the same unit of measurement. Your comments make me wonder if there is something more...?
I do, of course, mean that distances in each coordinate's direction have the same unit of measurement, but I mean more than that. Because the geometry is symmetric, user code can be refactored to be parameterized based upon abstract concepts such as horizontal/vertical orientation, positive/negative direction on the number line, up, down, left, right, positive X, negative Y directions etc. In this way poor quality code with lots of flow control that is used to call the different named function for accessing x, y and z values of a data type can be parameterized by the runtime condition of what orientation/direction is dictated. This is what I mean by compile time accessors (implied by generic order of the point) are mutually exclusive with istropic style, since it forces there to be flow control to choose between symmetric behaviors.
I'm not completely sure to see what you're talking about exactly, but maybe it is what I had thought about as the fact of "mapping coordinates". Let's say I have an algorithm that applies on 2D points and I want to apply it on the 2nd and 3rd coordinates of my 3D point. I have already thought about providing some compile-time mappers to make such things possible. Are you talking about this king of manipulation? (sorry if I misunderstood) Bruno