101–110 of 291 posts
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This is also nice because it gracefully handles the case where `max < min`.
It's not always graceful to say that 1 is both less than 0 and greater than 2.
> Googler
Then this is another proof that google doesnt only hire on mathematical puzzle tricks
Stage 1 ECMAScript proposal to add Math.clamp (among others): https://github.com/rwaldron/proposal-math-extensions But it looks dead: https://github.com/rwaldron/proposal-math-extensions/issues/... As someone mentioned in the thread, nested ternary is easier to interpret: (a > max ? max : (a < min ? min : a))
At the risk of starting a style debate, this may be easier to read if you write it like an if-else: a > max ? max : a
Fun seeing that pretty much everyone else finds that idiom confusing too. Half-serious, over breakfast: (case [(> n min) ( (Side note: Clojure's `>` and ` n min)` into "if n is greater than min" takes some work for me, still, after more than a year.)
In languages I use there’s usually no need to write that code. C++/17 has std::clamp() in header. Modern C# has Math.Clamp() since .NET Core 2.0; too bad it’s not available in desktop edition of the runtime. HLSL has clamp() intrinsic function, and a special version saturate() to clamp into [ 0 .. +1 ] interval.
> in desktop edition of the runtime huh?
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Can you give an example where median([a, min, max]) is not equal to clamp(a, min, max), given max >= min?
If a max, if I'm reading it right.
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I agree. But "min(-, constant_x)" should be thought of as "at most constant_x" and similarly for max. Maybe there's a way to make it more expressive.
I think your "at most" language is pretty expressive. You could do that as an alias for `min` and `max` I think `at_most(at_least(num, lower_bound), upper_bound)` is much easier to understand instantly than `min(max(...))`. I'm tempted to make these aliases myself in some of my development actually. I find a pretty big conceptual difference between "I want to find the minimum point in this data", and "I want to restr…
You could make clamp work in only one direction too. clamp(number, None, upper_bound) or the idiomatic equivalent in your language of choice seems pretty readable.
I find that the fact that the functions min and max have the same name as the variables min and max increases cognitive load which makes it harder to think about it. I find the following easier to read : Math.min(Math.max(num, lower_bound), upper_bound)
Easy to remember, but may take some time to grasp: Arrays.sort( {lower_bound, num, upper_bound} )[1]; Next challenge: teach the optimizer to make that almost as fast as the min/max way ;-) (You can’t reduce it to the min/max call because it also works if you accidentally pass a lower bound that’s larger than the upper bound. Worst-case, the above takes 3 comparisons, unless at least two of the inputs are constants)
Always good to know the underlying implementation, but for any Ruby readers check out clamp(). It's been available since 2.4. 25.clamp(5, 10) => 10 6.clamp(5, 10) => 6 1.clamp(5, 10) => 5
I often see [a, b, c].sort[1] which I think is very neat.