On Jun 2, 2014, at 12:11 AM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Objection #6: > > The determinant() method, being in this API the only easy way to get > something that looks roughly like a measure of invertibility, will probably > be (mis-)used as a measure of invertibility. So I'm quite confident that it > has a strong mis-use case. Does it have a strong good use case? Does it > outweigh that? Note that if the intent is precisely to offer some kind of > measure of invertibility, then that is yet another thing that would be best > done with a singular values decomposition (along with solving, and with > computing a polar decomposition, useful for interpolating matrices), by > returning the ratio between the lowest and the highest singular value. Looking at use cases, then determinant() is indeed often used for: * Checking if a matrix is invertible. * Part of actually inverting the matrix. * Part of some decomposing algorithms as the one in CSS Transforms. I should note that the determinant is the most common way to check for invertibility of a matrix and part of actually inverting the matrix. Even Cairo Graphics, Skia and Gecko’s representation of matrix3x3 do use the determinant for these operations. Greetings, Dirk _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
