On 4/20/2014 5:40 PM, Roy Smith wrote:
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?
One can either calculate variance from the sum of squared distances from
the mean point, or calculate x and y deviations separately and calculate
the covariance matrix thereof.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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