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Function names (was mean and sdev)
| Function names (was mean and sdev) [message #11068] |
Tue, 03 March 1998 00:00 |
Brian Jackel
Messages: 34
Registered: January 1998
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Member |
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Dr. G. Scott Lett wrote:
>
> The MOMENT function is obscure and slow when all you need is
> the mean and standard deviation, so we're adding the more obvious
> MEAN, STDDEV, VARIANCE and other statistics functions for IDL 5.1.
>
> Best wishes,
> Scott Lett
I'm not sure who the "we" above refers to, but I'd like to
make a general comment. IMHO IDL is already dangerously
cluttered with lots of special purpose functions that could
perhaps be more usefully bundled together. In the case of
statistics it would be better to have a function like MOMENTS
that could return any or all required moments. Even better
would be something (perhaps called STATISTICS) that could
provide a number of useful quantities. Although the use
of square brackets should eliminate the confusion between
functions and arrays, the proliferation of built-in functions
(especially with common names) may cause problems if the
name has been used for existing code.
Does anyone else have an opinion on this subject?
--
Brian Jackel
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