Eh!?

So I'm looking at srfi-133 and it appears to be broken in two ways.  First, its not compatible with srfi-43 by using the same name with different signatures, which (to me) is a fundamental design error (yes, of course, in C++ this is an "overloaded function w/ different type signatures", etc. and is indeed useful in certain cases, but still is often a pitfall for novice programmers. This is one reason why C++ gets a bad rap; it's easy to mis-use by novices.) To encounter this in a srfi is 100% unacceptable. This is deeply just-plain wrong, for what I would hope are obvious reasons known to all programmers? Wtf?  How did this pass review?

Issue two is that by omitting the index of the vector in the argument, this assumes that the vectors always live in a space that is symmetric under the special orthogonal group. How often does that occur? Sure, in high-school physics, where you learn that space is Euclidean and you learn about orthogonal transformations and sine and cosine, OK, but if you go to college, you learn about symmetries other than the special orthogonal group, and the index on the vector plays an important role. 

For example: in probability, the space is NOT euclidean, it's a simplex, and the symmetry group of probability theory are the Markov matrices, and not the orthogonal group!  Things like dot-products are NOT meaningful for probabilities, you have to use fisher information, instead, (which is "euclidean" projective under the square root, e.g. quantum wave functions, etc.)

My knee-jerk reaction is to throw srfi-133 in the trash-can as fast as possible. It's broken.

--linas