On 7 Aug 2007, at 12:06, Eric Niebler wrote:
I'm sorry you ran into trouble with floating-point offsets. To be honest, they were added to the time_series library as a bit of an after-thought, and they are admittedly not a seamless addition. With integral offsets, runs are in fact half-open. Floating-point runs are not -- it's not clear what that would mean. (E.g., a delta series D has a 42 at [3.14,3.14) -- that's a zero-width half open range! What should D[3.14] return?) Some of the algorithms won't work with floating-point offsets. If you feel this part of the library needs more thought, that's a fair assessment. I'm certain that had you used integral offsets your experience would have been less frustrating.
I think with better docs and more strict type checking, integral and floating point offsets can both be supported without confusion.
Don't confuse the sparse/dense time series with piecewise constant functions. A delta series D has 42 at 3.14, not at any interval [3.14,3.14) - intervals should be used only for the piecewise constant functions. Matthias