Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?

[Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com>]

Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> writes:

> vectors are how elisp got used to write functions that do statistics I
> think.  The vmean() function being one example and vmedian() being
> another.  Unfortunately org-mode hasn't got a vmode() function to go
> along with those two which is why I use datamash to calculate my
> helath statistics.
>

You mean *Calc* does not have a vmode() function: org spreadsheets
piggy-back on calc for vmean() (a.k.a. calc-vector-mean) and vmedian()
(a.k.a.  calc-vector-median). And indeed Calc does not define a vmode()
function. I think - without any inside knowledge - that's because the
mode can be very dependent on the distribution and different
circumstances would require different definitions (e.g. a multimodal
distribution with a bunch of maxima, not all the same: is the mode the
global maximum or is it the list of all the maxima? or perhaps a list of
a subset of the maxima - and in that case, which ones? Part of the
difficulty would be classifying a given empirical distribution - i.e. a
vector of values - as one or another of these multimodal distributions,
so that Calc would know which definition to use. But your *particular*
case might not require such classification (you know what kind of
distribution you have), in which case a specialised vmode() can be
written - but it would not apply in general).

--
Nick