Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 21:11:23
From: Aur?lien Aptel <aurelien.aptel+emacs@gmail.com>
To: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?
I'm just nitpicking, but:
On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 3:12 AM, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
direction and magnitude (in particular, it doesn't
have a position). But whatever the math, isn't that (a
The direction and the position you're talking about are geometry
concepts. Linear algebra is just a tool that can be used to model many
things e.g. in mechanics to represent forces, in euclidian geometry to
represent positions *or* directions, you can even used them to model
text documents [1] etc. In pure linear algebra, "direction" and
"position" are not defined for vectors. You could argue that elisp is
using vectors to model a specific concept (constant time random access
objects) and as such deserves its own notation, different from the
list.
See? It's all a matter of perspective.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model