On 4/20/14, 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? >
If you thing of the Standard Deviation being the Root Mean Norm2 of the deviations, it has a very similar meaning as to over the reals, a measure of the "spread" of the values. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
