On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock
<allen at wirfs-brock.com> wrote:
> Waldemar:  Why isn't it variadic?
> Luke:  2 or 3 is the 99% use case.
> Waldemar:  2 or 3 arguments is the 99% use case for max.
> Waldemar:  If it's not variadic and takes only 2 or 3 arguments,
> you'll get silent mistakes.  If you pass in four arguments, you'll get
> the hypot of the first three, and the last one will be silently
> ignored.  That's bad.

Heh! Thanks for the long quote.

It's striking how many good points Waldemar has in this exchange.

> Luke:  Will go back to the experts to explore implementing variadic hypot.

I don't know if I qualify as an expert, but variadic hypot would be no
harder to implement than what is currently specified (probably easier,
honestly), and no harder to optimize.

To answer a question posed in that discussion, one way hypot(a, b) is
better than sqrt(a*a + b*b) is that the latter underflows if the
arguments are both small, and overflows if either argument is large.

-j

On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Allen Wirfs-Brock <allen at wirfs-brock.com> wrote:
> ```
> Waldemar:  Why isn't it variadic?
> Luke:  2 or 3 is the 99% use case.
> Waldemar:  2 or 3 arguments is the 99% use case for max.
> Waldemar:  If it's not variadic and takes only 2 or 3 arguments, you'll get silent mistakes.  If you pass in four arguments, you'll get the hypot of the first three, and the last one will be silently ignored.  That's bad.
> ```

Heh! Thanks for the long quote.

It's striking how many good points Waldemar has in this exchange.

> ```
> Luke:  Will go back to the experts to explore implementing variadic hypot.
> ```

I don't know if I qualify as an expert, but variadic hypot would be no
harder to implement than what is currently specified (probably easier,
honestly), and no harder to optimize.

To answer a question posed in that discussion, one way hypot(a, b) is
better than sqrt(a*a + b*b) is that the latter underflows if the
arguments are both small, and overflows if either argument is large.