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

[Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com>]

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.

On Sat, 17 Oct 2015, Aur?lien Aptel wrote:

> 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
>
>

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