Source
- URL: https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1624473721648865285
- Author: John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack)
- Posted: 2023-02-11 18:21:31
Thread
1/ @ID_AA_Carmack
“Row/column major” should have been termed “row/column sequential” — “major” to me implies the larger step, not the smaller. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order
2/ @Jonathan_Blow
@ID_AA_Carmack
“major” just doesn’t mean anything to my brain. I never bother to use these terms for exactly that reason, I just know how things are stored.
3/ @cmuratori
@Jonathan_Blow @ID_AA_Carmack
It also doesn’t comport with any existing terminology. Nobody says English is a “row major” language while Japanese is “column major”. They say things like “left-to-right” and “top-to-bottom”, etc.
4/ @lobachevscki
@cmuratori @Jonathan_Blow @ID_AA_Carmack
It means principal/priority. This is a math based name, it predates the existence of any of those computer languages (Fortran or C).
5/ @cmuratori
@lobachevscki @Jonathan_Blow @ID_AA_Carmack
Well, C is a relatively late language, so everything predates that. But no, this terminology did not predate computer processing of matrices. It is coincident with them:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=row+major%2Ccolumn+major&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3