From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
Cc: Strauss, Randy (ARC-AF)[SGT, INC] <randolph.a.strauss@nasa.gov>
Cc: pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org <pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Lack of detailed documentation
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:36:54 -0400
Message-ID: <9456.1587598614@sss.pgh.pa.us> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <27125.1581367420@sss.pgh.pa.us>
References: <158110996889.1089.4224139874633222837@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
<CAKFQuwaUAxHPRn8t0zUA+ctE0dKDYhESGg2rnRJB8r8gN_XgfA@mail.gmail.com>
<6537.1581264535@sss.pgh.pa.us>
<3D8A56AB-AC13-46D7-B72B-B913A4ACDA7D@nasa.gov>
<CAKFQuwYd-G4o0a79pP8TuCvSYB-4B8ddSvADiEg3MVbKr_iRuA@mail.gmail.com>
<27125.1581367420@sss.pgh.pa.us>
I wrote:
> One thing that's sort of blocking any real progress on this is the
> draconian space constraints imposed by the tabular format, which is
> hurting us on a lot of these pages, not just this one. Alvaro did
> some preliminary investigation towards finding a better way,
> but nobody's tried to push that forward.
I've been making an attempt to improve that situation, and along
the way just pushed an expansion of the geometric-operator docs:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/functions-geometry.html
There's probably still some things to be desired, but it's a lot
less fuzzy than before.
One thing that surprised me is that I couldn't find any well-known
name for what the * and / operators are doing; digging around on
the net and in some dusty old math textbooks didn't yield any exact
matches. I ended up adding footnotes with the actual computations,
but I'm not very happy with that approach. Surely Lockhart[1] got this
definition from someplace, though, and didn't invent it out of thin air.
regards, tom lane
[1] I'd supposed we could blame this stuff on Berkeley, but excavation
in our git history shows it came in at
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=commitdiff&h=9e2a87b62db87fc4175b00dab...
... sans documentation of course.
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To: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
Cc: tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us, david.g.johnston@gmail.com, randolph.a.strauss@nasa.gov, pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Lack of detailed documentation
In-Reply-To: <9456.1587598614@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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