2 Supporting classes

2.1 Vectors and matrices

Among the most basic classes are those used to implement vectors and matrices, defined in maspack.matrix. All vector classes implement the interface Vector and all matrix classes implement Matrix, which provide a number of standard methods for setting and accessing values and reading and writing from I/O streams.

General sized vectors and matrices are implemented by VectorNd and MatrixNd. These provide all the usual methods for linear algebra operations such as addition, scaling, and multiplication:

⬇
  VectorNd v1 = new VectorNd (5);        // create a 5 element vector
  VectorNd v2 = new VectorNd (5);
  VectorNd vr = new VectorNd (5);
  MatrixNd M = new MatrixNd (5, 5);      // create a 5 x 5 matrix
  M.setIdentity();                       // M = I
  M.scale (4);                           // M = 4*M
  v1.set (new double[] {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}); // set values
  v2.set (new double[] {0, 1, 0, 2, 0});
  v1.add (v2);                           // v1 += v2
  M.mul (vr, v1);                        // vr = M*v1
  System.out.println ("result=" + vr.toString ("%8.3f"));

As illustrated in the above example, vectors and matrices both provide a toString() method that allows their elements to be formatted using a C-printf style format string. This is useful for providing concise and uniformly formatted output, particularly for diagnostics. The output from the above example is

  result=   4.000   12.000   12.000   24.000   20.000

Detailed specifications for the format string are provided in the documentation for NumberFormat.set(String). If either no format string, or the string "%g", is specified, toString() formats all numbers using the full-precision output provided by Double.toString(value).

For computational efficiency, a number of fixed-size vectors and matrices are also provided. The most commonly used are those defined for three dimensions, including Vector3d and Matrix3d:

⬇
  Vector3d v1 = new Vector3d (1, 2, 3);
  Vector3d v2 = new Vector3d (3, 4, 5);
  Vector3d vr = new Vector3d ();
  Matrix3d M = new Matrix3d();
  M.set (1, 2, 3,  4, 5, 6,  7, 8, 9);
  M.mul (vr, v1);        // vr = M * v1
  vr.scaledAdd (2, v2);  // vr += 2*v2;
  vr.normalize();        // normalize vr
  System.out.println ("result=" + vr.toString ("%8.3f"));
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