Why Python 3?
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Sun Apr 20 17:40:38 EDT 2014
In article <mailman.9383.1398012417.18130.python-list at python.org>,
Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 2:22 AM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at 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?
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