]> https://gitweb.dealii.org/ - dealii.git/commitdiff
Reword the documentation that seems to be a left-over from 1997.
authorWolfgang Bangerth <bangerth@math.tamu.edu>
Mon, 28 Mar 2005 17:25:14 +0000 (17:25 +0000)
committerWolfgang Bangerth <bangerth@math.tamu.edu>
Mon, 28 Mar 2005 17:25:14 +0000 (17:25 +0000)
git-svn-id: https://svn.dealii.org/trunk@10246 0785d39b-7218-0410-832d-ea1e28bc413d

deal.II/base/include/base/point.h

index d41822d044e45d560de83d623d842a4c47653356..72cb14f0b72d3a0c1ca60629ddfd53ede4bf8cf4 100644 (file)
  * you use double <tt>f(Point<dim> &p)</tt>.
  *
  * <tt>Point</tt> also serves as a starting point for the implementation of
- * the geometrical primitives like <tt>Polyhedron</tt>, <tt>Triangle</tt>,
- * etc.
+ * the geometrical primitives like cells, edges, or faces.
  *
- * <tt>Point</tt>s can also be thought of as vectors, i.e. points in a vector
- * space without an obvious meaning. For instance, it may be suitable to let
- * the gradient of a function be a <tt>point</tt> vector: <tt>Point<dim>
- * gradient_of_f (const Point<dim> &x)</tt>. <tt>Point</tt>s have all
- * functionality for this, e.g. scalar products, addition etc. However, you
- * should also consider using the simpler <tt>Tensor<1,dim></tt> class, which
- * seems more suited to gradients.
+ * Within deal.II, we use the <tt>Point</tt> class mainly to denote the points
+ * that make up geometric objects. As such, they have a small number of
+ * additional operations over general tensors of rank 1 for which we use the
+ * <tt>Tensor<1,dim></tt> class. In particular, there is a distance() function
+ * to compute the Euclidian distance between two points in space.
+ *
+ * The <tt>Point</tt> class is really only used where the coordinates of an
+ * object can be thought to possess the dimension of a length. For all other
+ * uses, such as the gradient of a scalar function (which is a tensor of rank
+ * 1, or vector, with as many elements as a point object, but with different
+ * physical units), we use the <tt>Tensor<1,dim></tt> class.
  *
  * @author Wolfgang Bangerth, 1997
  */

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams


Typeset in Trocchi and Trocchi Bold Sans Serif.