Code duplicacy in pathfinding and continuous space

[AayushSabharwal]

Currently we have a bit of code duplicacy in submodules/pathfinding/astar_continuous.jl and spaces/utilities.jl/spaces/continuous.jl

• get_spatial_property does something similar with indices as to_discrete_position in pathfinding
• sqr_distance in pathfinding is similar to edistance in utilities.jl
• It feels like there should be something we can do to combine get_direction and edistance but I'm not sure, since get_direction cares about the sign of the result, so it can't simply take an element-wise minimum of absolute differences.

This should be solvable without breaking changes. Is there a necessity for get_spatial_index to return a CartesianIndex? It should be able to be combined with to_discrete_position, and maybe some appropriately named function for the reverse conversion (currently handled by to_continuous_position).

Similarly, edistance could just return the sqrt of sqr_distance. Perhaps sqr_distance can have the signature sqr_distance{P}(a, b), so it dispatches on periodicity. This is required since sqr_distance currently dispatches on the periodicity of AStar whereas edistance does on that of the space.

I'll try and think of something for the third point, there's probably a nifty little trick with sign that would make it work

[Datseris]

@AayushSabharwal was this resolved in 5.0?

[AayushSabharwal]

It hasn't been resolved yet. It isn't a breaking change, so it can be released in a future patch version