Re: mathlib

[Jeremy Ong <jeremycong@...>]

Math/physics guy chiming in. The hyperbolic trig functions are easily
implementable in terms of the exponential but I think they are still
useful. However, I think the thing that is missing from this entire
conversation is an explicit explanation for the motivation behind
removing the functions as stated. What is the tradeoff exactly?

Personally though, I will say that I hate degrees in general and
completely in favor of removing deg/rad and slowly ridding the world
of this arbitrary 360 nonsense once and for all :D

On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 11:55 AM, Peter Colberg <peter@colberg.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2014 at 05:35:33PM -0300, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:
>> - sinh, cosh, tanh: (They are quite specialized, on par with several
>> other functions offered by external libraries, such as lhf's mathlibx.)
>
> Although I am far from being a mathematician, rather a physicist which
> equates to an applied mathematician (and these days far from a physicist,
> rather a chemical physicist which equates to an applied physicist),
> reading this proposal does hurt a bit.
>
> May I propose to spend just a minute this week gazing in awe at an
> image of the Mandelbrot set [1--4] and contemplate how such a visually
> complex structure emerges from a simple equation as z(n+1) = z(n)² + c.
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
> [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Mandelbrot_set_image.png
> [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
> [4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Fractal_Broccoli.jpg
>
> The scientists among the Lua users would be grateful to you for
> keeping at least the existing mathematical functions in the Lua
> standard library, even if (for them) they are trivial to implement.
>
> Peter
>