Why are there mini / maxi functions in the descriptive statistics package?
They seem to be redundant with the base functions lmin and lmax. Also, the
names mini and maxi are confusing; they would seem to mean the index of the
minimum element (argmin).
There are some differences between lmin and mini:
* mini/maxi handle matrices. Though the documentation doesn't specify the
definition, in fact it is the column-wise min/max (which seems arbitrary,
but whatever).
* lmin/lmax handle sets
* mini/maxi fail for the empty list; lmin/lmax correctly give inf/minf.
* mini( [ [2] ]) gives an error, but mini( [ matrix([2]) ] ) does not. Why?
min is perfectly happy with either.
Why not merge the functionalities and clean up the discrepancies?
-s