In article <mailman.9383.1398012417.18130.python-l...@python.org>, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 2:22 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > > When I'm writing a generic average function, I probably don't know whether > > it will ever be used to average complex numbers. > > This keeps coming up in these discussions. How often do you really > write a function that generic? And if you do, isn't it doing something > so simple that it's then the caller's responsibility (not the > function's, and not the language's) to ensure that it gets the right > result? > > ChrisA Hmmm. Taking the average of a set of complex numbers has a reasonable physical meaning. But, once you start down that path, I'm not sure how far you can go before things no long make sense. What's the standard deviation of a set of complex numbers? Does that even have any meaning? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
