From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu  Wed Sep  6 15:06:11 2000
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add min/max tests. (4/4) 
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Edward Jason Riedy <ejr at EECS dot Berkeley dot EDU>
Cc: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 14:58:32 -0500 (CDT)

On  5-Sep-2000, I wrote

| How about
| 
|   min (abs (x), abs (y))
| 
| ?

as a suggestion for how to explicitly state that you want to find the
numbers with the minimum magnitudes.  After sending it, I realized
that this is not really what you want, since it returns the minimum
magnitudes, not the NUMBERS with the minimum magnitudes.  So, I think
what is really needed is some way to tell the min and max funtions
what comparison operation (or function) to use.  That would allow the
programmer to clearly state his intention instead of relying on some
convention that can cause trouble when there are mixed types or the
potential for automatic data type conversions to occur.

Also, if it were up to me (or if I could do it over again) I would
want to avoid the problem that results from min, max, and other
functions working on columns of a matrix except when the matrix
happens to have only one row.

jwe