[Nickle] How to make min do the right thing?

[Carl Worth]

I've got what seems like the simplest of problems, but I'm looking for
a little guidance.

I've got:

	typedef struct {
		int a, b;
	} s;

I want to define the following three functions for computing minimum
values in the obvious ways:

	int mina(s  list ...) { /* return minimum a value  */ }
	int minb(s  list ...) { /* return minimum b value  */ }
	int min(int list ...) { /* return minimum arg value */

What's not obvious is what to do when any of these functions receive
an empty list. Throwing an exception would seem natural, but it so
happens that I have the following case in my algorithm:

	result = min(mina(foo ...), minb(bar ...))

where I "know" that either dim(foo) or dim(bar) may be 0, but never
both. So, I wouldn't mind getting an exception from the outer min, but
I don't want either of the inner calls to throw an exception; I just
want them to do the right thing.

In C I would use INT_MAX to get what I want, but of course that's not
an option.

I guess I could achieve a similar result by using a union to return
either an int or a value that should compare greater than any
int. Something like:

	typedef union {
		int val;
	        void max;
		void min;
	} extremal;

	extremal mina(s list ...)
	{
	    extremal min = extremal.max;

	    for (int i=0; i < dim(list); i++)
	        if (min == extremal.max || list[i].a < min.val)
	            min.val = list[i].a;

	    return min;
	}

That's pretty good. It's still easy to use mina directly to get an int
or a run-time exception as appropriate:

	mina(foo...).val

And I can also rewrite min as:

	extremal min(extremal list ...) { /* return minimum arg value */ }

so that I get exactly the behavior I want with:

	min(mina(foo...), minb(bar...)).val

The only downside is that the "min" function is no longer easy to use
with int arguments since it now only accepts arguments of type
extremal. And the guts of the min functions aren't as elegant as I
would wish since I can't use the relational operators with extremal
values, (min is even a little uglier than mina above). Clearly I'm
really wanting better polymorphism here.

What think ye, am I getting close to the nicklest way of doing this?
(At least with the present-day implementation).

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth@east.isi.edu
3811 N. Fairfax Dr. #200, Arlington VA 22203		  703-812-3725