Seconded. It seems like if two functions exist to perform the same job,
there should be a very good reason why this is so. Perhaps in the next
release, your points will be addressed.
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 13:27, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>wrote:
> 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
>
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