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"Michael Burschik" <Burschik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > But my point that an empty vector is a pathological case > > remains valid. > > > An empty list, or an empty collection/set, however, is > > perfectly legitimate. > > > > There is nothing more pathological about an empty vector than any of > > the others. > > I seem to recall that zero-dimensional vectors were considered something of > an oddity in my algebra classes, and I am pretty certain that I have never > used one, whereas I use empty lists and empty sets on a regular basis, but > maybe you are right. They are like the empty set: they seem odd only until they seem second nature, at which point they are ordinary and boring. Rather like zero, actually. What is slightly odder is a matrix of dimension zero; such a matrix necessarily has no elements. This is unusual, because for any other dimension, a single-element matrix is possible. That means that you can convert scalars to matrixes for any dimension but zero. Still, not a big deal.