Am 30.05.2011 21:33, schrieb Allin Cottrell:

>
> Sorry for the delayed response; my internet access is still
> intermittent. But here's my 2 cents worth (not intended to be
> definitive). I agree with Jack's earlier point about keeping the
> number of built-in functions down to a reasonable number. To that
> end, I think I'd prefer to have a built-in "moments" function that
> gives a matrix with mean, variance, skewness and (excess?)
> kurtosis, and not bother with separate skewness and kurtosis
> functions.
>
> Rationale: mean and standard deviation (and/or variance) are
> wanted so often that it makes sense to have specific functions for
> those purposes. But skewness and kurtosis will be wanted much less
> often, and when people want those they probably want the first two
> moments too, so why not just one function for the "fancy" stuff?

If a function moments() is introduced, I would suggest to make it more
general: e.g. moments(x,i) could return up to the i-th moment of x in a
i-column matrix, with i>0. Otherwise I would prefer the two functions
skew() and kurt() over one function moments().

cheers,
sven

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