We closed this forum 18 June 2010. It has served us well since 2005 as the ALPHA forum did before it from 2002 to 2005. New discussions are ongoing at the new URL http://forum.processing.org. You'll need to sign up and get a new user account. We're sorry about that inconvenience, but we think it's better in the long run. The content on this forum will remain online.
IndexSuggestions & BugsWebsite,  Documentation,  Book Bugs › Suggestion for PVector reference
Page Index Toggle Pages: 1
Suggestion for PVector reference (Read 1217 times)
Suggestion for PVector reference
Jan 4th, 2009, 10:22pm
 
In the PVector reference there's currently a passage that reads:

"A class to describe a two or three dimensional vector. This datatype stores two or three variables that are commonly used as a position, velocity, and/or acceleration."

I'm learning about vector maths and I found this confusing. The way this is currently worded, one could get the false impression (as i did) that a single PVector object commonly stores values corresponding to position, velocity and acceleration. In fact (If I've understood correctly) the correct meaning is that a single PVector object is commonly used to encode _either_ position, velocity or acceleration.

Here's my suggestion for an alternative description text that I think would be less likely to be misinterpreted. Please feel free to add corrections or point out errors in my understanding:

"A class to describe a two or three dimensional vector. Two dimensional PVector objects hold two values, three dimensional PVector objects hold three values. These values normally correspond to the x, y and z axes in a coordinate system.

A single PVector object typically gets used to describe position (coordinates for each dimension), velocity (the rate/direction in which the object’s position changes per time unit, for each dimension) or force (a strength and direction which exerts an influence on an object’s velocity over time).

Since vectors represent groupings of values, we cannot simply use traditional addition/multiplication/etc. Instead, we’ll need to do some "vector" math, which is made easy by the methods inside the PVector class."
Re: Suggestion for PVector reference
Reply #1 - Feb 28th, 2009, 10:45pm
 
This is a really good point.  I'm currently working on a PVector tutorial which I am going to post to the Processing site soon. . . When I finish the tutorial I'll work on rewriting the reference page to be more clear as well.

Thanks again!
Page Index Toggle Pages: 1