Boost logo

Glas :

Re: [glas] value_type

From: Theodore Papadopoulo (Theodore.Papadopoulo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-10-03 06:38:59


On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 12:46 +0200, Herman Bruyninckx wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Oct 2005, Karl Meerbergen wrote:
>
> > We now have started the development of some functions for vectors
> since
> > a few weeks. All of them rely on the fact that the value_type's are
> > numerical value types (NumericValue concept). In the first document
> > about GLAS we supposed that vectors and matrices only contain
> numerical
> > values. I recall vague suggestions on the mailing list on expanding
> the
> > value_type to other than float, double, std::complex<float>,
> > std::complex<double>.
> >
> > Before continuing with any more new algorithms, it might be good to
> know
> > which other value_type's should be supported.
> >
> I can imagine some use cases for ints (e.g., computer vision, where
> each
> image is matrix of integer values, from 0-256, or 0-2^16), and for
> "bools"
> (e.g., vectors of digital IO, or "incidence" representations for
> graphs,
> etc.).

I think it might also be extremely interesting to have interval
arithmetic... It would make glas a tool offering some real new
possibilities as compared to blas and co...

That being said it would make sense to have any kind of values that
belong to a mathematical field (whatever that means in their computer
implementatiion): quaternions, modular arithmetic comes to mind.

Now, it's certainly not the goal to have glas to implement directly all
of those. It is sufficient to document the necessary operations and to
keep their number as low as possible.