What does *-1 means? - delphi

I don't know how to find keyword for this (*-) in Google, and I don't know what is name. So I ask here.
Sample code :
StartDate:=IncMinute(FinishDate,TotalMinutes*-1);
What is TotalMinutes*-1 if I write in 'normal' syntax ?

It is multiplying TotalMinutes by -1... IOW, it looks like it is decrementing the Minutes.
Write it like this: TotalMinute * -1 and it is more clear. The * is the multiplication operator and the - is the unary minus operator.

Related

single, double and precision

I know that storing single value (or double) can not be very precise. so storing for example 125.12 can result in 125.1200074788. now in delphi their is some usefull function like samevalue or comparevalue that take an epsilon as param and say that 125.1200074788 or for exemple 125.1200087952 is equal.
but i often see in code stuff like : if aSingleVar = 0 then ... and this in fact as i see always work. why ? why storing for exemple 0 in a single var keep the exact value ?
Only values that are in form m*2^e, where m and e are integers can be stored in a floating point variable (not all of them though, it depends on precision). 0 has this form, and 125.12 does not, as it equals 3128/25, and 1/25 is not an integer power of 2.
Comparing 125.12 to a single (or double) precision variable will most probably return always False, because a literal 125.12 will be treated as an extended precision number, and no single (or double) precision number would have such a value.
Looks like a good use for the BigDecimals unit by Rudy Velthuis. Millions of decimal places of accuracy and precision.

How to Round to the Nearest Tenth?

Given any number of the sort 78.689 or 1.12 for instance, what I'm looking for is to programmatically round the number to the nearest tenth place after the decimal.
I'm trying to do this in an environment where there is a math.floor() function that rounds to the lowest whole number, and as far as I can tell from documentation there's nothing like PHP's round() function.
There's simple snippet at: http://lua-users.org/wiki/SimpleRound
function round(num, numDecimalPlaces)
local mult = 10^(numDecimalPlaces or 0)
return math.floor(num * mult + 0.5) / mult
end
It will misbehave when numDecimalPlaces is negative, but there's more examples on that page.
You can use coercion to do this...
It work just like printf... You can try to do something like in this snippet.
value = 8.9756354
print(string.format("%2.1f", value))
-- output: 9.0
Considering that this is roblox, it would just be easier to make this a global variable instead of making a single module or creating your own gloo.
_G.round = function(x, factor)
local factor = (factor) and (10 ^ factor) or 0
return math.floor((x + 0.5) * factor) / factor
end
In my case, I was simply trying to make a string representation of this number... however, I imagine this solution could prove useful to others as well.
string.sub(tostring(percent * 100), 1, 4)
so to bring it back to a numerical representation, you could simply call tonumber() on the resulting number.

Is there a language construct in F# for testing if a number is between two other numbers (in a range)?

I am looking for a more succinct F# equivalent of:
myNumber >= 2 && myNumber <= 4
I imagine something like
myNumber >=< (2, 4)
Is there some kind of operation like this?
There is no native operator, but you could define your own one.
let inline (>=<) a (b,c) = a >= b && a<= c
John's answer is exactly what you asked for, and the most practical solution. But this got me wondering if one could define operator(s) to enable a syntax closer to normal mathematical notation, i.e., a <= b <= c.
Here's one such solution:
let inline (<=.) left middle = (left <= middle, middle)
let inline (.<=) (leftResult, middle) right = leftResult && (middle <= right)
let inline (.<=.) middleLeft middleRight = (middleLeft .<= middleRight, middleRight)
1 <=. 3 .<=. 5 .<= 9 // true
1 <=. 10 .<= 5 // false
A few comments on this:
I used the . character to indicate the "middle" of the expression
. was a very deliberate choice, and is not easily changeable to some other character you like better (e.g. if you perhaps like the look of 1 <=# 3 #<= 5 better). The F# compiler changes the associativity and/or precedence of an operator based on the operator symbol's first character. We want standard left-to-right evaluation/short-circuiting, and . enables this.
A 3-number comparison is optimized away completely, but a 4+ number comparison results in CIL that allocates tuples and does various other business that isn't strictly necessary:
Is there some kind of operation like this?
Great question! The answer is "no", there isn't, but I wish there was.
Latkin's answer is nice, but it doesn't short-circuit evaluate. So if the first test fails the remaining subexpressions still get evaluated, even though their results are irrelevant.
FWIW, in Mathematica you can do 1<x<2 just like mathematics.

matlab indexing into nameless matrix [duplicate]

For example, if I want to read the middle value from magic(5), I can do so like this:
M = magic(5);
value = M(3,3);
to get value == 13. I'd like to be able to do something like one of these:
value = magic(5)(3,3);
value = (magic(5))(3,3);
to dispense with the intermediate variable. However, MATLAB complains about Unbalanced or unexpected parenthesis or bracket on the first parenthesis before the 3.
Is it possible to read values from an array/matrix without first assigning it to a variable?
It actually is possible to do what you want, but you have to use the functional form of the indexing operator. When you perform an indexing operation using (), you are actually making a call to the subsref function. So, even though you can't do this:
value = magic(5)(3, 3);
You can do this:
value = subsref(magic(5), struct('type', '()', 'subs', {{3, 3}}));
Ugly, but possible. ;)
In general, you just have to change the indexing step to a function call so you don't have two sets of parentheses immediately following one another. Another way to do this would be to define your own anonymous function to do the subscripted indexing. For example:
subindex = #(A, r, c) A(r, c); % An anonymous function for 2-D indexing
value = subindex(magic(5), 3, 3); % Use the function to index the matrix
However, when all is said and done the temporary local variable solution is much more readable, and definitely what I would suggest.
There was just good blog post on Loren on the Art of Matlab a couple days ago with a couple gems that might help. In particular, using helper functions like:
paren = #(x, varargin) x(varargin{:});
curly = #(x, varargin) x{varargin{:}};
where paren() can be used like
paren(magic(5), 3, 3);
would return
ans = 16
I would also surmise that this will be faster than gnovice's answer, but I haven't checked (Use the profiler!!!). That being said, you also have to include these function definitions somewhere. I personally have made them independent functions in my path, because they are super useful.
These functions and others are now available in the Functional Programming Constructs add-on which is available through the MATLAB Add-On Explorer or on the File Exchange.
How do you feel about using undocumented features:
>> builtin('_paren', magic(5), 3, 3) %# M(3,3)
ans =
13
or for cell arrays:
>> builtin('_brace', num2cell(magic(5)), 3, 3) %# C{3,3}
ans =
13
Just like magic :)
UPDATE:
Bad news, the above hack doesn't work anymore in R2015b! That's fine, it was undocumented functionality and we cannot rely on it as a supported feature :)
For those wondering where to find this type of thing, look in the folder fullfile(matlabroot,'bin','registry'). There's a bunch of XML files there that list all kinds of goodies. Be warned that calling some of these functions directly can easily crash your MATLAB session.
At least in MATLAB 2013a you can use getfield like:
a=rand(5);
getfield(a,{1,2}) % etc
to get the element at (1,2)
unfortunately syntax like magic(5)(3,3) is not supported by matlab. you need to use temporary intermediate variables. you can free up the memory after use, e.g.
tmp = magic(3);
myVar = tmp(3,3);
clear tmp
Note that if you compare running times with the standard way (asign the result and then access entries), they are exactly the same.
subs=#(M,i,j) M(i,j);
>> for nit=1:10;tic;subs(magic(100),1:10,1:10);tlap(nit)=toc;end;mean(tlap)
ans =
0.0103
>> for nit=1:10,tic;M=magic(100); M(1:10,1:10);tlap(nit)=toc;end;mean(tlap)
ans =
0.0101
To my opinion, the bottom line is : MATLAB does not have pointers, you have to live with it.
It could be more simple if you make a new function:
function [ element ] = getElem( matrix, index1, index2 )
element = matrix(index1, index2);
end
and then use it:
value = getElem(magic(5), 3, 3);
Your initial notation is the most concise way to do this:
M = magic(5); %create
value = M(3,3); % extract useful data
clear M; %free memory
If you are doing this in a loop you can just reassign M every time and ignore the clear statement as well.
To complement Amro's answer, you can use feval instead of builtin. There is no difference, really, unless you try to overload the operator function:
BUILTIN(...) is the same as FEVAL(...) except that it will call the
original built-in version of the function even if an overloaded one
exists (for this to work, you must never overload
BUILTIN).
>> feval('_paren', magic(5), 3, 3) % M(3,3)
ans =
13
>> feval('_brace', num2cell(magic(5)), 3, 3) % C{3,3}
ans =
13
What's interesting is that feval seems to be just a tiny bit quicker than builtin (by ~3.5%), at least in Matlab 2013b, which is weird given that feval needs to check if the function is overloaded, unlike builtin:
>> tic; for i=1:1e6, feval('_paren', magic(5), 3, 3); end; toc;
Elapsed time is 49.904117 seconds.
>> tic; for i=1:1e6, builtin('_paren', magic(5), 3, 3); end; toc;
Elapsed time is 51.485339 seconds.

integer division

By definition the integer division returns the quotient.
Why 4613.9145 div 100. gives an error ("bad argument") ?
For div the arguments need to be integers. / accepts arbitrary numbers as arguments, especially floats. So for your example, the following would work:
1> 4613.9145 / 100.
46.139145
To contrast the difference, try:
2> 10 / 10.
1.0
3> 10 div 10.
1
Documentation: http://www.erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/expressions.html
Update: Integer division, sometimes denoted \, can be defined as:
a \ b = floor(a / b)
So you'll need a floor function, which isn't in the standard lib.
% intdiv.erl
-module(intdiv).
-export([floor/1, idiv/2]).
floor(X) when X < 0 ->
T = trunc(X),
case X - T == 0 of
true -> T;
false -> T - 1
end;
floor(X) ->
trunc(X) .
idiv(A, B) ->
floor(A / B) .
Usage:
$ erl
...
Eshell V5.7.5 (abort with ^G)
> c(intdiv).
{ok,intdiv}
> intdiv:idiv(4613.9145, 100).
46
Integer division in Erlang, div, is defined to take two integers as input and return an integer. The link you give in an earlier comment, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IntegerDivision.html, only uses integers in its examples so is not really useful in this discussion. Using trunc and round will allow you use any arguments you wish.
I don't know quite what you mean by "definition." Language designers are free to define operators however they wish. In Erlang, they have defined div to accept only integer arguments.
If it is the design decisions of Erlang's creators that you are interested in knowing, you could email them. Also, if you are curious enough to sift through the (remarkably short) grammar, you can find it here. Best luck!
Not sure what you're looking for, #Bertaud. Regardless of how it's defined elsewhere, Erlang's div only works on integers. You can convert the arguments to integers before calling div:
trunc(4613.9145) div 100.
or you can use / instead of div and convert the quotient to an integer afterward:
trunc(4613.9145 / 100).
And trunc may or may not be what you want- you may want round, or floor or ceiling (which are not defined in Erlang's standard library, but aren't hard to define yourself, as miku did with floor above). That's part of the reason Erlang doesn't assume something and do the conversion for you. But in any case, if you want an integer quotient from two non-integers in Erlang, you have to have some sort of explicit conversion step somewhere.

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