I am creating a function in matlab that takes in two lat/long coordinates (opposite corners of a rectangle) and returns information about data in the region.
How do I group my inputs?
e.g. [lat1,long1] and [lat2,long2]; or [lat1,lat2], [long1,long2].
To make it easy on the user I currently have the lats and longs grouped together like the latter example, but am thinking the former is a bit more appropriate for science/math.
It depends, of course, on the semantics that the user of your function would expect, based on the domain. With lat1, long1, lat2, long2 you’re essentially taking two points: lat1, long1 and lat2, long2.
*-(lat1, long1) --+
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+-- -* (lat2, long2)
Whereas with lat1, lat2, long1, long2, you’re taking 4 axis bounds: the top, bottom, left, and right. I’ve never seen this before, but I can imagine it might be common in some domains, or for example when using interval arithmetic.
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-+---------lat1--------+-
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long1 long2
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-+---------lat2--------+-
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I don’t know how Matlab deals with types, but in a conventional imperative language I would expect functions to take arguments of more descriptive types, for example:
Info rect_info(Point top_left, Point bottom_right)
Info area_info(Range vertical, Range horizontal)
It’s also worth considering terminology. Two arbitrary numbers are not necessarily a Point, but you can represent a Point with them—if your API takes numbers when it wants points, then you’re exposing implementation details to the user. You could go a step further—two arbitrary Points are not necessarily a Rectangle, and two arbitrary Ranges are not necessarily an Area.
In MATLAB a rectangle in Cartesian coordinates is typically represented as a 4-element row vector of the form [x, y, width, height], where [x,y] are the coordinates of the upper-left corner. You may consider following the same convention with latitude and longitude.
