Paul Rubin <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > I could imagine using Python's built-in complex numbers to represent > 2D points. They're immutable, last I checked. I don't see a big > conflict.
No big conflict at all -- as I recall, last I checked, computation on complex numbers was optimized enough to make them an excellent choice for 2D points' internal representations. I suspect you wouldn't want to *expose* them as such (e.g. by inheriting) but rather wrap them, because referring to the .real and .imag "coordinates" of a point (rather than .x and .y) IS rather weird. Wrapping would also leave you the choice of making 2D coordinates a class with mutable instances, if you wish, reducing the choice of a complex rather than two reals to a "mere implementation detail";-). The only issue I can think of: I believe (I could be wrong) that a Python implementation might be built with complex numbers disabled (just like, e.g., it might be built with unicode disabled). If that's indeed the case, I might not want to risk, for the sake of a little optimization, my 2D geometry framework not working on some little cellphone or PDA or whatever...;-) Alex -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
