I imported the math library in my program, and I was trying to find the minimum of three numbers in the following way:
v1[j+1] = math.Min(v1[j]+1, math.Min(v0[j+1]+1, v0[j]+cost))
where v1 is declared as:
t := "stackoverflow"
v1 := make([]int, len(t)+1)
However, when I run my program I get the following error:
./levenshtein_distance.go:36: cannot use int(v0[j + 1] + 1) (type int) as type float64 in argument to math.Min
I thought it was weird because I have another program where I write
fmt.Println(math.Min(2,3))
and that program outputs 2
without complaining.
so I ended up casting the values as float64, so that math.Min
could work:
v1[j+1] = math.Min(float64(v1[j]+1), math.Min(float64(v0[j+1]+1), float64(v0[j]+cost)))
With this approach, I got the following error:
./levenshtein_distance.go:36: cannot use math.Min(int(v1[j] + 1), math.Min(int(v0[j + 1] + 1), int(v0[j] + cost))) (type float64) as type int in assignment
so to get rid of the problem, I just casted the result back to int
I thought this was extremely inefficient and hard to read:
v1[j+1] = int(math.Min(float64(v1[j]+1), math.Min(float64(v0[j+1]+1), float64(v0[j]+cost))))
I also wrote a small minInt
function, but I think this should be unnecessary because the other programs that make use of math.Min
work just fine when taking integers, so I concluded this has to be a problem of my program and not the library per se.
Is there anything that I'm doing terrible wrong?
Here's a program that you can use to reproduce the issues above, line 36 specifically: package main
import (
"math"
)
func main() {
LevenshteinDistance("stackoverflow", "stackexchange")
}
func LevenshteinDistance(s string, t string) int {
if s == t {
return 0
}
if len(s) == 0 {
return len(t)
}
if len(t) == 0 {
return len(s)
}
v0 := make([]int, len(t)+1)
v1 := make([]int, len(t)+1)
for i := 0; i < len(v0); i++ {
v0[i] = i
}
for i := 0; i < len(s); i++ {
v1[0] = i + 1
for j := 0; j < len(t); j++ {
cost := 0
if s[i] != t[j] {
cost = 1
}
v1[j+1] = int(math.Min(float64(v1[j]+1), math.Min(float64(v0[j+1]+1), float64(v0[j]+cost))))
}
for j := 0; j < len(v0); j++ {
v0[j] = v1[j]
}
}
return v1[len(t)]
}