From 1dbf1dfd76063cac68705cace99f8c3a3a3c837e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Wolfgang Bangerth Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 17:25:14 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Reword the documentation that seems to be a left-over from 1997. git-svn-id: https://svn.dealii.org/trunk@10246 0785d39b-7218-0410-832d-ea1e28bc413d --- deal.II/base/include/base/point.h | 21 ++++++++++++--------- 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) diff --git a/deal.II/base/include/base/point.h b/deal.II/base/include/base/point.h index d41822d044..72cb14f0b7 100644 --- a/deal.II/base/include/base/point.h +++ b/deal.II/base/include/base/point.h @@ -30,16 +30,19 @@ * you use double f(Point &p). * * Point also serves as a starting point for the implementation of - * the geometrical primitives like Polyhedron, Triangle, - * etc. + * the geometrical primitives like cells, edges, or faces. * - * Points 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 point vector: Point - * gradient_of_f (const Point &x). Points have all - * functionality for this, e.g. scalar products, addition etc. However, you - * should also consider using the simpler Tensor<1,dim> class, which - * seems more suited to gradients. + * Within deal.II, we use the Point 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 + * Tensor<1,dim> class. In particular, there is a distance() function + * to compute the Euclidian distance between two points in space. + * + * The Point 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 Tensor<1,dim> class. * * @author Wolfgang Bangerth, 1997 */ -- 2.39.5